etisalat committed to take mobile broad band to rural SL

Indunil HEWAGE

etisalat - Sri Lanka reiterates its commitment to play a dominant role in taking the mobile broad band penetration to rural geographies in the country. “We do not wait for broadband penetration to happen in Sri Lanka, we endeavor to make it happen in Sri Lanka launching low cost- mobile devices to take the internet to the village.

The company also expects to spread its dominance in the mobile application segment which is growing rapidly across the world,” etisalat CEO Dumindra Ratnayake says.

etisalat holds the leading position in the local mobile broad brand segment with a 50 % market share on monthly basis and according to Ratnayake, the company has doubled its investments in Sri Lanka in the post war period as against the pre-war period.

Highlighting the challenges encountered by mobile operators in Sri Lanka, Ratnayake noted that rupee depreciation and rising energy cost had a major impact on etisalat entire operational activities.

The problem is not confined to etisalat and all the operators in Sri Lanka are facing the same issue since we are importing a lot of services and machinery by paying in dollars.

In addition, etisalat is focusing on the developing talented mobile applications developers in the country and has already created a platform for developers to interface with the network to develop mobile applications based on MMS and SMS.

etisalat is the first to deploy dual carrier HSPA+ Technology in South Asia and the 63rd operator in the world to launch this network.

Dual carrier HSPA+ technology helps to utilize resources better and to achieve spectrum efficiency through joint resource allocation and balancing loads among the down-link carriers.