The Sri Lanka Telecom (SLT) in collaboration with Huawei, would work on the ‘Smart city’ project at the Colombo Port City, Chief Executive Officer, SLT, Kiththi Perera, said at the Huawei Lanka ICT Congress in Colombo on Monday. Globally, 84% active internet users search for a product or service online, while 75% of them purchases a service or product online. In terms of the devices been used, 42% are laptops, while 55% are mobile phones. In Sri Lanka, there are 29 million mobile subscriptions, while there are 7.1 million Internet users. This accounts to nearly 34% penetration. Nearly 30% of them use social media. However, only 6.2% users in Sri Lanka go online to purchase products or services and only 2.4% uses a mobile money account.
“This is somewhat low in comparison to global statistics, he said. Thus, infrastructure needs to be developed to enable everyone to connect to the Internet safely. “As the National IT provider, our primary goal is to connect everyone to develop our digital partner ecosystem,” he said. Technology needs to be used appropriately, to enhance the living standards of the people and increase the economic growth of the country. The facilities should be there to build up faith so that people could perform online transactions on secure platforms. Technology should also be present to cover each and every corner of the country. More than 70% digital transformation projects have failed due to lack of ability to address ‘culture,’ aspect of digital transformation.
Hence, much understanding needs to be there when digitizing activities within the country. Based on Consumer as a Business, a number of initiatives are been worked upon. The Cloud service provided by the SLT, had expanded further to support cloud storage facilities which was earlier restricted to government and enterprise officials. Along with this, anybody could access the Cloud for storage purposes. “We are planning to bring in fintech platforms in the future,” he added.
This would surely permit consumers to perform online transactions securely. They have also invested for OTT (Over The Top) platforms to distribute streaming media as a stand alone product directly to viewers over Internet. The ‘Smart Home’ initiative would also be launched within the first quarter of this year.
The Lanka Government Network (LGN 2.0) was launched by the SLT to provide a digital storage for government operations. This was able to connect 860+ government officials across the country through a high speed fibre network. This would be expanded further, to cover the entire island.
“We are inviting other key institutions to partner us to automate and transform health and education sectors to smart e-health and e-education systems,” he added.
Thus the entire Island will be digitized to meet up global requirements with the advancing technology.
This would open up Sri Lanka for a Technological hub within the Indian Ocean which would penetrate the country for more foreign investments that would in turn lead to the increase of the national economy.
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