Sri Lanka Telecom’s SEA-ME-WE-5 Submarine Cable landing station at Browns Hill Matara was inaugurated by President Maithripala Sirisena on Monday evening.
The President also digitally laid the foundation stone for the South Asia’s first state-of-the-art Submarine Cable Depot in Galle port which will be operated and managed by SLT and provide submarine cable maintenance within an area between Djibouti in the west, Perth in the South from January 1, 2018.
Sri Lanka will be the only Submarine Cable Depot in the South Asian region. Minister of Telecommunication and Digital Infrastructure Harin Fernando said that they presently Sri Lanka is one step ahead of India as they are still not connected to SEA-ME-WE-5 cable network.
He also said that they hope to provide every Advanced Level student with a tab and a key board with internet connection by April next year. This will also help to take ICT to rural homes. The pilot project in this regard was held at Visakha Vidyalaya Badulla and it was a big success.
“We will also be introducing the Local Government Network (LGN) soon which will help reduce government expenditure on printing, travelling and official’s time in day to day administration of the nation.”
This SEA-ME-WE-5 (short form for South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe-5) undersea cable system will enable SLT to provide higher transmission speeds as well as reduce their cost. “It will increase SLT’s international bandwidth capacity tenfold and will be sufficient to meet the ICT requirements of the country for 25 more years,” said P. G. Kumarasinghe Sirisena Group Chairman of Sri Lanka.
“SEA-ME-WE-5 is capable of delivering a gigantic 24 Tera bits per second global bandwidth capacity to Sri Lanka and this will also help contribute greatly towards the vision of making Sri Lanka the digital hub of the region. Sri Lanka Telecom has invested over Rs. 20 billion for this project which spans more than 20,000 kilometers was completed within a space of two years. Sri Lanka Telecom always makes investments with Sri Lanka’s future ICT requirements in mind. Of SLT’s total investment of Rs 275 billion, Rs 100 billion has been invested on digital technology.” He also disclosed that the tier 3 data center in Pannipitiya will be commissioned in November this year.
Minister of Finance and Media Mangala Samaraweera, State Minister of Enterprise Development Lakshman Yapa Abeywardena, Deputy Minister of Telecommunication and Digital Infrastructure, Tharanath Basnayake also participated.
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