SLT announces official completion of i-Sri Lanka national broadband project

Sri Lanka Telecom (SLT) has announced that it has completed the main aims of its ‘i-Sri Lanka’ broadband project with Chinese technology partners ZTE and Huawei, in an official closing ceremony for the project held on 28 March 2016 in the capital Colombo. Through the i-Sri Lanka programme initiated in 2011, SLT sought to provide broadband connectivity at 20Mbps to 90% of its customers. A press release declared: ‘In December 2015, SLT completed all phases of the i-Sri Lanka programme by adding over 4,500 new access nodes across the island which comprised of an investment that exceeded LKR13 billion (USD87 million). Through the i-Sri Lanka programme, broadband connectivity is now available in almost all the cities of the country. Further, with the marking of this important milestone, SLT will be able to provide 1,300,000 more broadband connections at data rates of up to 20Mbps and will support Sri Lanka’s first fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) network which is set to deliver data speeds of 100Mbps. With this, SLT will be able to serve 70,000 households through FTTH by the end of this year (2016).’