Sri Lanka’s fixed broadband speeds are some of the lowest in South Asia.
Sri Lanka’s Internet is quite slow by regional standards. We do, however, have wide coverage and it feels cheap. That is, I have a lot of friends online, but they all complain about how slow it is. That’s better than not being online at all, but it still sucks.
These graphs are from LIRNEasia’s yearly South Asian Quality Of Service review (direct PDF). Some of the data is from another LIRNEasia report by Helani Galpaya.
Fixed Broadband
Let’s start with fixed broadband, which would be basically Sri Lanka Telecom ADSL. This is a government company and they suck to work with (takes days for a connection, offices are sparse and sparsely open) but they do provide ADSL. Helani’s report cites SLT to say that they have about 213,816 ADSL subscribers. I went in for a connection last week so make that 213,817. It still doesn’t work and I’m pissed so that number might fluctuate.
How do the speeds measure up? Well, bad, as you can see from the graph above, Sri Lankans are getting about 400 Kbps on a 2 Mbps line.
Actual speeds compared to what’s advertised
As you can see, we’re getting significantly less than what’s advertised. If you look through the full report, you’ll also see that we’re paying more for less (download speeds per dollar).
Mobile Broadband
Mobile Broadband is wonderful, it’s cheap (about Rs. 5000 for a modem and then Rs. 3,000 a month for limited use) and widespread (I have rarely been unable to connect, islandwide). Helani’s report cites about 294,000 subscribers, according to the TRC. MoBro is, however, slow and gets expensive if you want to download movies or use the Internet with gleeful abandon. When I went to India a year ago they didn’t even have 3G, which Sri Lanka has had for years. It’s not like Sri Lankan companies don’t innovate, I think they just get choked up in terms of international bandwidth.
Mobile broadband speeds also at the bottom
As you can see, speeds are slow,
Mobile broadband Internet advertising is completely fanciful
and less than advertised.
So
These are only a few graphs and download speeds are only one measure. What’s nice is that we can now quite confidently say Sri Lanka’s Internet and not be talking about a niche product. There are at least 280,000 fixed subscribers (including dial-up, ADSL and WiMax) and around 300,000 mobile broadband subscribers. There are also over 1 million HSPA/3G mobile users with active data use. This is all via Helani’s report btw.
The rub is that while more Sri Lankans are on the Internet, we are all wasting a bunch of time and getting frustrated at how slow it is. And while, to a degree, that may be out of any one company’s control (except perhaps the state controlled SLT), their advertising certainly is in their control, and the advertised speeds are offensively wrong.
Man those speeds suck, I will die if I have to live with it. how I connect. But that is unusual here as well. it is supposed to be 50MB down and 20MB up. How long does it take to download say a OS DVD in SL? days?
You can improve the download speed of reduced bandwidth at prescribed times of day, to some extent anyway, by using a VPN. I find that when I connect to the UK or US with the VPN, torrents in particular come down up to 10 times faster. VPNs also allow access to some great region-locked TV, radio and podcasts, not least BBC’s iPlayer.
I use Overplay and highly recommend it for value, ease of use (at least on OS X) and reliability. Though perhaps, given that the ISPs deliberately reduce bandwidth allocation at peak times, it’s a bit anti-social to use VPNs.
Someone once tweeted “Sri Lankans waste half their lives stuck in traffic, and the other half waiting for something to finish downloading” :D
PravNJ told me that the SLT fibre backbone is up and running (providing impressive bandwidth) but that our international bandwidth is the bottleneck. :/
Also, Magerata – so jealous of your speeds! :D And what I usually do is download LiveCDs and then add on the other stuff when needed. It would literally take days to download the DVD. :P
I’m on their 1mb adsl, and downloads are worse than dialup. Somehow they’ve managed to deliver regular html content at normal speeds, while any download(including images on a page) take forever, usually going at about 1-3KBPS, a far cry from the advertised ~120 that works at night. And I live all the way out here!
Mobile broadband sorta works. I keep switching to it for downloads during the day.
SLT”s fibre lines have been up for a while now, even your campus has a direct connection to one I think. Our(across the fields from yours), used to get good speeds(around 12MB/s -> 96Mb/s), piggybacking on the line to MIT I think, till SLT figured out that they hadn’t restricted bandwidth on our conn.
Haha. :D One of my friends at yours said they still tap into the MIT wifi. ;)
Sometimes it works the other way around too… ~50kB/s downloads, and yet it takes ages to load YouTube or even GMail. :/
What pisses me off are our lease line prices. Those are through the roof. It’s something like 80000rs per month for 1GB line. That looks like profiteering to me.
Sorry about that Chavie, but I do not even think of downloads, depending on the site hosting the file, a DVD is done in less than an hour. I got a business account ‘cos I needed the static IPs and no limits on down loads, which is at about 250GB for consumer accounts. All together I pay about $137 / month for that service about $50 more than the consumer service. This also includes the phone and medium level TV service.
Hi Chavie, I tested the connection at my office today here are the results Looks like we have a 100MB connection :) But then there are a bunch of people there sharing the bandwidth.
I find the speed okay. but it is the monthly restrictions on broadband thats troublesome. my dialog dongle has 7 GB monthly max and my friends have mobitels and dialogs with 1GB to several GB monthly max.. the limit is the problem..
unfortunatly yes :(
Very well said. We are holding with these terrible services because we have no other choice. If better service providers like at&t, verizon can come to our country and offer us a better deal those millions of customers will definitely convert their broadband line to new providers.
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