Chennai, India - Despite the expanding markets and plummeting prices, when it comes to quality, Sri Lankan broadband users receive significantly less than what is enjoyed by their North American counterparts, a study by LIRNEasia, an Asia based telecom plicy think tank shows.
“After comprehensively testing popular broadband packages in New Delhi, Chennai and Bangalore with Dhaka and Colombo we also came to the conclusion that this is the case in the South Asian region as well,” Chanuka Wattegama, Senior Research Manager LIRNEasia told the Sunday Times FT, on the sidelines of a press briefing called by LIRNasia to discuss broadband issues in South Asia.
“When compared with the test results of comparable broadband packages in USA (Buffalo and Denver) and Canada (Ottawa) the performance of the South Asian packages were seen significantly low,” he said. He said that it was also seen that Sri Lankans receive less value for money due to the pattern of server access, because Sri Lankans most of the time access US- or Europe-based servers.
“This may be due to the relatively higher cost of website hosting seen here compared to the US and Europe. As a result, even some local sites are often hosted abroad.
This clogs the international bandwidth, a rare and expensive commodity,” he said. “A comprehensive methodology to benchmark Broadband Quality of Service Experience (QoSE) was developed jointly by LIRNEasia and the TeNeT Group of the Indian Institute of Technology Madras.
There is no barrier for regulators to use it and the methodology is largely user centric. “This methodology uses AT Tester, an open source software tool to monitor all crucial QoSE broadband metrics over a longer period, on both weekends and weekdays, covering peak as well as off peak traffic,” he noted. |
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