High speed Internet services with cutting edge technology

Sanath SIRIWARDENA

Many people in the country today use Internet as a medium to get their things done much easily than ever before. Dial-up Internet services in the country started to lose the place it once occupied as the next generation Internet access methods emerged.

The successor has managed to conquer the entire Internet sector in Sri Lanka by almost doubling its customer base within a very short period of time.

However, when we consider the supply of Internet services, there would be many doubts. Specifically it’s the quality of broadband service that lacks and not the technology. The latest cutting edge technology is already deployed and it has the capability of serving citizens with high speed Internet services.

The last mile is the final segment of the network between user and the Internet service provider. In a wired broadband service such as in ADSL, it’s the segment between user and the telephone exchange. Similarly in a wireless broadband, it’s the connectivity between the user and the signal tower that he or she is connected to.

However due to an unethical over subscription ratio commonly known as Contention Ratio employed by ISPs, broadband subscribers in the country are facing numerous difficulties while using the Internet. Among many, the most disturbing thing is the low data transfer speed the user experiences when accessing the Internet. As a result, public has to spend excessive time to accomplish even the simplest task.

To justify this condition many unrealistic reasons were provided by the operators. The lack of local content and international bandwidth charges were commonly used as the justifications.

In addition, bandwidth sharing characteristics innate in the Internet was wrongfully used to cover the outcomes of the oversubscription mechanism employed.

Over-subscription

Over-subscription is nothing new to telecommunication. No public network would ever be possible without having a reasonable over-subscription ratio.

But in an environment where regulatory regime is ineffective, the service provider or rather the ISP would increase this over subscription ratio beyond the permissible limit by letting large number of subscribers share the available bandwidth at any given time.

This will lead the quality of the service to drop drastically beyond the limits of broadband. In broadband Internet this subscription ratio is known as the ‘contention ratio’ and higher the contention ratio, lower the quality would be.

If local content is to be blamed and sighted as the reason, questions may arise as for not having enough content within the country for the consumption of users.

Developing local web content wouldn’t be so easy as long as web hosting charges remain high in the country. The majority of ISP’s are providing web hosting facilities to companies, institutes and for individuals who host their web content locally.

Though they have provided some additional features, hosting a web site internationally would be many times cheaper than hosting a web site locally. What does this mean? We are the same people charging unethical rates for hosting web sites and at the same time blaming the user for accessing international content.

If users were provided with rich web content locally, a considerable amount of web traffic accessing international servers could be averted. Still the reaming traffic cannot be prevented from accessing the international web sites as predicted by ISP’s, in a developing country like Sri Lanka. Because, rich well developed content is usually found in developed countries.

For example, under graduate students must participate in an online education sessions webcast by the foreign universities regularly. It is quite clear the rest of web traffic that is generated locally cannot be retained under any condition unless we stop all international relations over the Internet.

This is not a practically sound solution. But this could be done in a more constructive way. If ISP can reduce the web hosting charges whereby allowing the content to be hosted locally, some significant amount of traffic could be retained.

Actually this would increase the efficiency of the web performance and more importantly this would save a considerable amount of data traffic that unnecessarily travels up and down in the international backbone segment of the ISP.

It is more like Internet service providers in the country has not taken any interest to control the things within their jurisdiction. Whilst other providers in the world are offering unlimited email storage to its users, providers in Sri Lanka are unreasonably charging from users for the email storage above 10MB.

Free web space allows user to share their multimedia content on the web and almost every broadband customer is provided with this facility in the world.

The astonishing discovery is, our operators weren’t kind enough and were unreasonably charging rupees 100 for a very small web space of 10MB.

So this is how local operator motivate Sri Lankan Internet community to access the international domains regularly. Where there is no authority sound enough to identify these types of malaises in broadband, operators would take the fullest advantage timely.

Slashed

Since international backbone charges were slashed by over 75 per cent in the world, the expensive international backbone charge theory doesn’t seem to be working to the interest of the provider anymore. Actually the local operators would not get the opportunity to acquire a Gigabit capacity international backbone bandwidth as they have boasted, if the charges weren’t slashed by the international carriers.

Majority of last mile broadband connections comprises of 512kbps bandwidth which is about to become an obsolete in the broadband platform due to its limited bandwidth capacity. This is the immediate bottleneck we find in Sri Lanka when last mile Internet connectivity is concerned.

The bandwidth between ISP and the user must be broadened to broadband standards beyond the limit of 1Mbps in Sri Lanka by assuring unrestricted access to the applications irrespective of their content capacity. A swift action from the Government would be required in this regard to revise the standards of broadband in the country.

However, when quality of the last mile come to the light, the bandwidth sharing theory were used to disguise the ill-effect of the oversubscription mechanism at ISP’s end. This would be a very misfortunate situation for broadband users in the country.

High speed Internet was designed to transfer data at very high speeds between computers. The efficiency of the broadband is totally depending on the speed of the link that carries the traffic.

The world has recognised how this efficiency of broadband would help the economy if high speed connectivity is provided to everyone in the civil society. Unfortunately the economic benefits that belong to the national economy were lost as operators failed to provide cost effective broadband service in the last mile.

To rectify this, a strong regulatory hand is imperative to bring the oversubscription ratio to a reasonable level immediately. Simultaneously public must be educated and informed about the technicalities of broadband Internet which would be very helpful in return to protect the rights of the consumer.

One of the main reasons for substandard broadband in the last mile is the adverse effect of high oversubscription method that was carried out with the intention of saving ISP’s bandwidth. However the customer should not become the victim for this type of commercial issues and it’s the duty of the authorities to prevent such conditions for the sake of customers. Oversubscription is a must in telecommunications. But if provider is exceeding the permissible limits in a public service, that would be a great injustice for the entire nation.

The right time has come. The last mile bandwidth should be broadening beyond the limit of kilobytes (kbps) per second by allowing users to access the information quickly and efficiently. To increase the meaningfulness of this task the data transfer speeds provided must also be increased simultaneously with the increase of the bandwidth.

The institutes in the country abide by the duty to promote e-Sri Lanka initiative, must draw their immediate attention to this very important issue, if e-Sri Lanka is to become a reality as we all have expected. Then ideas can be turned in to action more easily.

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