Sri Lanka It's Happening

September 3, 2005

The story begins nearly three years ago when Sri Lanka Telecom first announced their ADSL service. The service was unfortunately available only with in the city limits and I live less than 200 M from the city limits. These connections were quickly used up.

SLT used to have a monopoly on telecom operations. That is one of the prime reasons that Sri Lanka is lagging behind other Asian countries. Fortunately the monopoly was broken with the entry of Cell Tel but it wasn't until Dialog came into the picture that every Sri Lankan finally had a chance to say hello. SLT has it's own Mobile phone service which is nothing more than a joke.

SLT unfortunately still has a monopoly on broadband. Other operators only offer leased lines. Their high rentals (15,000-20,000 Month for 64k) and installation charges rules it out for domestic used. Suntel once announced DSL connections but it is not clear whether they have even a single client.

So for the past two years, I have been calling up the SLT ADSL center once a month to inquiry when the ADSL would be available in my neighbour hood. Each time I would get the stock answer "In another 2-3 months". This dragged on, and in the meantime coverage was expanded to some of the suburbs but I was left behind.

Finally three weeks ago, I learned through the SLT website that ADSL has finally become available Peliyagoda and that is where chapter two of this story begins.

Posted by raditha at September 3, 2005 5:06 AM