Axiata Group subsidiary Dialog Axiata has announced the switching on of its 4,000th network tower – in Thihawa village, Kurunegala District, North Western province – as it continues to make good on its commitment to expand coverage to rural communities in the area. For the remainder of the year the operator has pledged to deploy another 450 towers in remote/rural communities (in support of the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission of Sri Lanka [TRCSL’s] ‘Gamata Sanniwedanaya’ project), and targets more than 95% population coverage by 31 December 2021.
Dialog Axiata claims that during the COVID-19 pandemic it witnessed more than 100% growth in mobile data traffic while fixed broadband data traffic surged by over 200%. To meet this demand, it upgraded the capacity of 2,831 mobile 4G towers and 1,816 fixed broadband towers and now plans to improve the capacity of ‘more than 75% of the sites in the network by the end of the year’. To facilitate this, the company has invested in 40MHz spectrum in the 2600MHz band while also reallocating 13MHz of frequency previously used for 2G and 3G to 4G broadband with the approval of the TRCSL.