Sri Lanka It's Happening

September 4, 2005

Having learnt of the availability of ADSL in neighbourhood, I rushed to the nearest teleshop. That was on the morning of the 6th of August. The SLT Teleshop staff had not yet been informed and they seemed quite suprised when I asked for the application forms.

They wanted to check with one of their offices and SLT being SLT, the staff at that office were not working on Saturday. I did collect an application and returned on monday with the completed form. Only to be told that the connection would take about 3 weeks to setup because of a burned out circuit. (This is SLT they have no understanding of fail over solutions). This inspite of their call centers assurance that the connection takes only 3-4 days.

After a wait of two weeks I finally called the Teleshop and inquired about my application. The moronic women who answered the phone gave a different number with in the premises to ring. The Teleshop apparently does not have a working PABX. The person who answered the second time around gave me the number of their Maradana office which apparently handles ADSL connections.

As expected when the Maradana office was dialled I was given yet another number to call. This time I had a name of a person instead of a faceless/nameless moron.

To be fair the lady at the other end was quite helpfull. She discovered that the application had not been processed at all, it had just been gathering dust in some file. Which is to be expected since this is Sri Lanka Telecom.

She acted quickly and send it for verification. She was nice enough to call back in a few hours time to say the connection would be activated in about 3 days. This was on monday the 29th of August.

Next came the matter of setting up my modem. The modems sold by the teleshop are compatible only with Windows. So I ended picking up an ADSL router from Unity Plaza.

Then on thursday, I set about the task of setting up my connection, only to find that the line had not been activated yet. I called the helpfull lady, and she confirmed my line had indeed been activated. Obviously it had not been activated.

In frustration called my good friend Amila, who promised to call a friend of his at STL and ask him to set things right. If you want anything done in colombo you need connections.

The next day, I made a complaint to the SLT call center. Finally a few hours later a techy from the ADSL dept called me and I informed him of the problem. He checked the database and was suprised to see account had not been activated. This inspite of the call center operator and the helpfull lady assuring me that it had been. He asked for 15 minutes to set things right.

After half an hour when light on the router was still blinking, I called the techie gain. This time he probably yelled at someone because the line was finally upgraded to a Asynchronous Digital Subscriber Line in minutes.

I still didn't have the settings to go online, no one had bothered to inform me of the setting till now, but managed to dig them up with a google search. And finally, after a long, long, long wait, I am online through an ADSL connection. It's supposed to be 512kbps, feels slow as a 64kbps leased line.

Posted by raditha at September 4, 2005 5:17 AM