Broadband Internet would never become live unless it is powered with speed

Sanath SIRIWARDENA

Day by day, the name broadband is becoming familiar to our people. Hoardings and other media advertising materials have started to invade the billboards of our surroundings. Started in 2003, with a single player, the broadband market was just there for the past four years till the second broadband player entered the market recently.

The stagnated - motionless broadband market in the country suddenly ignited as more and more players came in.

Sri Lankan broadband market consists of three wireless broadband operators and one wired operator. But the question is would this number alone fulfill the requirements of information technology in the country.

Since broadband intended to transfer data between computers, its quality and its standard is mandatory. The sole idea behind broadband would be to increase the efficiency of the Internet based tasks that it undertakes. For example, under e-health, the video stream between the patient and the doctor must be reliable and capable of handling good quality video picture from beginning to the end.

To achieve such technical standard the broadband service provider must provide an exceptional quality service to its users around the clock. If quality is lost the efficiency of the broadband Internet would also be lost.

The second question is among the many operators, how many of them could deliver a good quality real fast broadband service to the country. What is common in Sri Lankan broadband sector is a mixture of expensive-good quality and low-priced poor services. The acceptable quality high speed broadband Internet service above 700kbps, is really expensive.

The next option low quality broadband services are less expensive but they cannot be branded as high speed Internet.

When e-Sri Lanka initiative is considered the success of the entire project depends on the communication infrastructure facilities available for the outburst of its services.

Furthermore the concept of the e-government is to provide many of its citizen services to people through the platform of Internet. But if public could not access the services using the Internet or the services are not fast enough, what would be the use of having e-government in any country?

Therefore, having an affordable high speed broadband Internet service in the country is very much needed for the success of the e-government process. The service access facility such as broadband Internet and e-government is more or less a single product that mutually bonded with each other and cannot be treated separately.

These days having a computer at home without having an Internet connection hooked up is useless; having a computer with slow speed Internet connection is even worse. To open up the doors and to unleash hidden powers of information technology, every house in Sri Lanka must be connected to the Internet through high speed broadband connections in the future.

Since e-Sri Lanka runs over the Internet or rather intranet, having a fast connection is an essential. Furthermore, to unlock the features of the Internet, operators must remove the bandwidth restrictions what so ever implemented in international access segments, intended to slowing down users.

The old Internet services like dial-up which runs at 56kbps speed or similar nominal broadband services are inadequate to pump data from modern web sites built with rich multimedia content.

The web designers and web application developers are forced to put as many data as possible into web applications to enhance the quality of service that they provide. These interactive web pages require the user to have fast connection to their web sites to pump data at correct speeds.

If the user cannot fulfill this requirement at his end, he or she has to compensate for this by spending excessive time on line as data slides slowly through the connection. If it's a news item that comes as a streaming video, user would not be able to watch it in real time.

The truth is most Sri Lankans have experienced these types of shortcomings while using their broadband Internet connections. As mentioned earlier, consumer unawareness and leniently regulated market give unofficial rights to providers to run substandard services without much bother.

Many crafted stories were uttered to misguide users regularly. Sometimes we find operators let down the customer half way through, in the middle of nowhere. A good example is a mobile broadband service started off with full colours last year; the quality of the service had plunged to the ground, shattering the hopes of its users.

This shows the unreliability state of broadband and their instability. Even we could accept some service fluctuations; periodic service degradations lasted for 3- 4 months cannot be accepted.

But, more or less it had become the customary way of providing broadband in Sri Lanka. What we find good would become bad by tomorrow leaving the branding of broadband an extremely a difficult task in Sri Lanka.

Anyhow between good and bad, some have displayed true colours of broadband giving some hope to people. Recently, we have managed to download 696MB file in 1 hour and 42 minutes using 1Mbps broadband service by exhibiting the capabilities of high speed broadband.

What does this mean? Even though its expensive, (approx: Rs 5000 per month)one could download a whole movie or software that comes in a CD in less than two hours. This helps increase the efficiency, save time and more importantly it is saving the user's electricity too.

The negative impact of slow speed broadband Internet could be far worse than we simply think of. The reason is services runs below 100kbps require the user to keep the PC turned on for longer period and this consumes lots of power causing a heavy burden to our national electricity grid by adding more weight to the national power crises.

The same file of 696MB, would require approximately 13 hours and 15 minutes if trying to download during the day time using a service which runs below 100kbps.

Volume based services are out of question here, even though they perform slightly better since their allocated data volumes are inadequate and one would consume whole monthly volume capacity allocated in less than a day if one tries to download this size of file on particular service.

Actually slow speed broadband services decrease the efficiency of our work and increase the electricity consumption largely. Therefore take extra care of your electricity bill if you are on poor, slow- speed broadband service.

Being the deciding factors that govern the broadband, the quality and the price have actually prevented the country from achieving its IT goals in the span of five years. Poor quality and expensive broadband packages kept people away from this latest technology; this would be a disadvantageous situation for the development of the economy.

Moreover, due to substandard quality, the real colours of the broadband technology was somewhat misrepresented in the society. People disbelieve its benefits and soon would lose confidence in broadband technology as it might not deliver the intended benefits to concerns.

Though we talk about speeds, some may not find broadband speeds as a problem as they seem totally unaware of the standards of high speed Internet. Therefore we must make them aware of the standards and the benefits that it returns if speeds are in the correct range.

In this regard we need to identify a standard for broadband in the future. What we should not forget here is, the broadband speed standard is a moving one and what we define as broadband today could become a narrowband tomorrow.

The conclusion is that high speed Internet is what we need right now to promote e-Sri Lanka concept in the country. The standard must be developed to represent the true identity of the high speed Internet where all citizens could access evenly, irrespective of their social levels.

The sole idea behind broadband is to transfer data at greater speeds than in dial up or any other similar Internet service. We moved on to faster computers to compete with the growing tasks of applications.

Likewise we need to move to faster Internet services in Sri Lanka if we really need to embrace the benefits of Internet. Therefore, until we meet such standards, broadband will never become live and the country would miss the benefits of information super highway when we need it most.

Finally broadband Internet would never become live until it is powered with high speed data service. Therefore I invite all responsible parties in the country to identify the importance of this national task and help the transformation in favour of its people.

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