TRCSL to investigate mobile broadband speed claims

The Telecommunication Regulatory Commission of Sri Lanka (TRCSL) will investigate the quality of 3G HSPA mobile broadband services in the country.

It is said that service providers advertise their services claiming to provide the theoretical maximum speed of the technology. It is alleged that the actual speeds are much below the theoretical maximum.

A number of factors limits the speeds of HSPA broadband received by end users.

The distance to the tower, the number of simultaneous subscribers attached to the tower, tower's bandwidth, operator's local network infrastructure, international backbone capacity and the type of the device use by the end users would affect the final result.

There is a gap between the speeds advertised by the operators and the actual speeds experienced by users.

The operators prefer to advertise the peak speeds for marketing purposes.

The high bandwidth speeds which incorporated with HSPA evolved technology provide some kind of marketing advantage to the mobile broadband operators.