The State of “Broadband” in Sri Lanka – Take 1

Lirneasia’s come out with preliminary test results of the Quality of Service of three of the most widely used broadband packages in Sri Lanka, SLT Office (2 Mbps / 512 kbps), SLT Home (512 kbps / 128 kbps) and Dialog (2 Mbps / 512 kbps). (With Dialog, I’m not sure what exactly they tested (Dynamic or Static IP package) and whether this makes a difference.)

I’ve touched base with Lirneasia off and on broadband speeds in Sri Lanka as well as in other countries and it’s good to finally see a rigorous, impartial and insightful study in this vexed and vexing issue.

The preliminary results of the survey are available here. For me the greatest eye-opener was the lack of any discernible difference between the SLT Home and Business packages. Actually, it’s what I suspected for a long time after upgrading from the Home to the Business package around a year ago at a significant difference in cost monthly for no appreciable improvement in the quality of data transfers I got on average.

The notice of the presentation that Lirneasia sent around had two representatives from SLT and Dialog who were supposed to be on the panel as respondents, but the post on the event does not record their participation or their reactions and responses.

I have little experience with Dialog’s broadband solutions save for marketing campaigns really did jump the gun on promising connectivity that their implementation of Wimax simply could not match. Incidentally however, the best downloads I’ve got in Sri Lanka have been at Kandalama Hotel which I believe is on some sort of Dialog wireless connection (wimax or HSPA) late last year. I’ve never even come close to those speeds using ADSL or HSPA at any time of day on any day.

It will be interesting to see future iterations of this survey that look into HSDPA / HSPA solutions from SLT / Mobitel and Dialog. Having got a HSPA 3.5G connection from Mobitel a while ago, I’m happy to report that I am far more happy with the QoS on it than with my Business ADSL connection (just tested the download rate and it’s 93.3kbps at 5.30pm on a Wednesday. Would have compared to SLT ADSL, but see below). I’ve not run any robust tests, but from using it quite a bit when I’m travelling and also at peak time, the speeds I get for uploads and downloads are again certainly not near to what’s advertised or what the Mobitel Sales Rep told me they would be, but are a damn sight better than ADSL.

Office got a Dialog HSDPA connection (it’s the same Huawei USB modem as mine) for our mobile citizen journlism work with Vikalpa in particular, yet they seem far less happy with it than I am with mine from Mobitel.

But at the end of the day, wireless connectivity depends on the same backend network infrastructure as wired / ADSL connections, which raises the question as to just why the Mobitel HSPA QoS is markedly better than SLT ADSL connectivity. Perhaps it is an issue of saturation?

It may be just coincidence, but I’ve also noticed far more ADSL outages in the past two weeks. My ADSL connection in Nugegoda has got very unreliable and at the time of writing this, ADSL services are out for Colombo 7, Wellawatte and some other areas in Colombo. Office tells me that this now happens quite regularly. Either SLT is upgrading something somewhere or their QoS is just getting worse. Hope it is the former.

The picture I get from all this is that things are not as bad as I assumed they would be. However, that’s small comfort for those of us who have been paying significant more for an SLT ADSL package for a QoS that’s overall no better than or equal to a Home package.  For my work, what’s revealing from these preliminary results is that there is really no option at present than to stick with my ADSL connection (I may downgrade back to the Home package) and my HSPA connection, for which I pay a small fortune at the end of the month. Is it too much to really expect telcos to provide what they promise? And when the final results are published, I wonder whether consumers can take legal action against telcos for not providing what they promise and actually state in their marketing campaigns?

A final thanks to Chanuka from Lirneasia who has kindly included my name in his presentation. Lirneasia’s work (in particular their BOP research, on which I have still to write on in this blog) has helped me more than any other organisation to justify my on-going work with citizen journalism and new media as a means through which one can strengthen democratic governance, peace and fundamental rights. Years ago I began work on ICT4Peace with the hunch that mobile devices / phones would change the way in which citizens communicate with governance and governance mechanisms in the swabhasha, and that wireless internet access / cloud computing and diminishing costs of access would make them producers of content instead of passive recipients and consumers of content dished out to them by e-government initiatives with a downstream emphasis. It’s heartening to see research from Lirneasia supporting the validity of these early assumptions and my continuing work in ICT and peacebuilding.

Now if I only could just bloody get a decent connection to download that gargantuan Vista Service Pack…

The ripple effect of Changents

I came across an interesting idea that brings to the screen what social change agents really do in our societies. A new web based initiative to support social change agents, Changents, has an interesting visualisation of the manner in which your support to one or many of them, as well as other actions on the Changents website such as inviting others to join, strengthens and affects the larger network and the work of the individuals concerned.

The site is heavy on Flash ad video and is designed for broadband, which is not surprising since many of those listed on it to date seem to be located in the US. My interest in the site is less about the people therein and more about how innovative ways of visualising the support given to these individuals can actually promote their work and generate support for it. So much of social change is intangible and long term that the challenge always is, for those who support the work of these folks, to see how their contribution meaningfully strengthened the work it was intended for. The 3D visualisation on Changents gives a better understanding of how one’s actions can create ripple effects of their own to raise awareness on vital issues and support individuals actively working in these areas.

It’s also social engineering. By making one’s support visual and into a sort of social game where the more interaction on and support you give  to the site enhances one’s own ripple, you actually encourage people to do more, or at the very least, visit the site more often to see just how much one’s ripple can influenced others to act.

Managing the catastrophic loss of information and knowledge

The amount of information already out there is mind-boggling. Equally so is the amount each of us generate through emails, photos and multimedia content generation. All this means, according to an IDC report (The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe), that in 2007 for the first time, “the amount of information created, captured, or replicated exceeded available storage for the first time in 2007. Not all information created and transmitted gets stored, but by 2011, almost half of the digital universe will not have a permanent home”.

That’s frightening and raises a number of questions.

• What will biographers, researchers, social scientists and others do in the future when much, if not all of the communications of their subjects may be rendered inaccessible by a single data centre outage, or lost to even the subjects themselves by failing to backup data?
• With bigger hard drives comes the risk of more information loss. This century may create more information than all others before it, but it will also lose more information. What are the technologies that can be used for cheap, reliable, easy to use local data storage that can create mini data centres for communities of users unable to afford comprehensive backup solutions of their own? Is there a case here for e-gov initiatives that actually promote backup solutions amongst citizens (I know of none to date).
• What are the data standards that can be used to store information produced today by the machines that will replace PCs and mobiles phones 25 years hence?
• Social networking sites are information black-holes as well as rich in personal information. If a site goes out of business, so does the information. How can we prevent this?
• For organisations such as the UN and even large NGOs (as well as corporations) information management in an age where there is more produced than can be stored is a nightmare. The organisations I work with can’t even find what they are producing today, leave aside searching for and accessing information produced a few years ago. How can institutional memory survive in a context of inevitable information loss?
• How does one harvest knowledge from all this information, much of it useless for the purposes and processes we want to be informed by?
• Old news is good news. What’s news to me is not just the latest RSS feed from BBC, but also resources that are pertinent to my life and work that may have been produced years ago. Buried in intranets or behind subscription walls or deep in social networks and websites, what are the technologies that will help locate and deliver these in a timely, easily and intuitively configurable and sustained manner across a range of media and devices?

 Also read:

• The Encyclopedia of Life: Information visualisation
• DARPA’s GALE and the new generation of information analysis systems
• Yahoo!’s Time Capsule and farming knowledge
• Reuters AlertNet: Interactive maps on conflict, humanitarian crises and more
• Indexing knowledge – Designing search engines for conflict and peace research
• Social networks poised to shape Net’s future & information visualisation