SLT Vision Com (Pvt) Ltd, a subsidiary of Sri Lanka Telecom (SLT), which manages Personalized Entertainment Option (PEO) TV, is to be disbanded and its operations taken over by the SLT with the aim of providing a better customer service and minimizing losses of the company, SLT sources said this week.
Vision Com employees numbering 125 will be seconded to SLT and they will have to work along with SLT employees in marketing and maintaining all the SLT product range including Voice, Data and IPTV. Earlier the Vision Com employees were engaged in marketing and maintaining of PEO TV only. SLT regional staff also handled the marketing and maintaining of PEO TV along with other SLT products and services. However the wire line connections and ADSL services had been provided by the SLT by deploying its staff, resulting in high operational costs for the SLT. It has also failed to fulfill the needs of customers, the sources said.
The PEO TV office will be shifted from its present location at 60 Davidson Road (off the Duplication Road), Colombo 4, to SLT head office at Colombo Fort shortly. The new move is aimed at providing Voice, Data and IPTV services of SLT under one roof for the convenience of customers, a member of the SLT Board of Directors said. SLT Vision Com (Pvt) Ltd is paying Rs. 1 million per month as rent for the building and on the other hand the company is losing around Rs. 100 million per month as its operational cost is very high, he said. The SLT Board has decided to re-examine its IPTV investment as it had failed to gain expected results, he said.
Meanwhile SLT trade unions and employees are vehemently protesting against the action to amalgamate Vision Com employees with SLT. They said that most of these employees serving on contract and permanent basis had been recruited outside the recruitment criteria of the SLT. Some of them are drawing exorbitant salaries, more than the salaries of even SLT senior officials. All staff appointments, promotions and fixing of salaries for officials had been done by Vision Com without adhering to administrative regulations followed by other SLT subsidiaries like Mobitel, Sky Networks and Manpower. Absorbing these employees who have no qualifications and experience to SLT will create an industrial dispute, trade union officials said.
They alleged that Vision Com has become a white elephant depending on SLT owing to mismanagement of the company’s Chief Executive Officer Thushara Weerasooriya. He was responsible for paying high fees for middlemen to obtain the telecasting rights of foreign channels, they charged. These facilities could be obtained by paying a reasonable fee directly to the relevant authorities of foreign channels, they said. SLT trade unions revealed that Vision Com management has paid sales commission for 60, 000 PEO TV connections although the actual customer base was 28,000. Mr Weerasuriya, who would be absorbed to the SLT management, was not available for contact. His secretary told the Business Times that the CEO has said he was unable to comment on the issues without permission from a higher authority.
Potential subscribers and existing subscribers charged that PEO TV has failed to add channels such as FX, Fox Crime and Animal Planet even after publishing in their brochures that these channels are available. PEO TV promises heaven but delivers hell, they said. Picture quality is very low on PEO TV, compared to other cable options in Sri Lanka. Worst of all PEO TV customer care service doesn’t help customers when in need. Receptionists answering the telephone keep customers on hold for a long time, an irate customer said. On the other hand, SLT has lost Rs. 324 million over an IPTV equipment deal. The matter is now before the Colombo Fort Magistrate Court. All these factors had prompted the SLT board of directors, to re-examine its IPTV investment, the SLT director said.
IPTV services were launched three years ago essentially to make use of the vast idling untapped bandwidth being available for other parties (called unbundling the local loop, a practice done in well established telecom markets), so as to promote competiton in wire based broadband ADSL services -the cheapest and ever-present of available broadband technologies. SLT had its long time interest of introducing IPTV facility to its customers over the same copper pair telephone line. This copper line was made to serve three services Voice, Data and IPTV simultaneously without any interruption to any of the said services. SLT Vision Com (Pvt) Ltd has failed to achieve this objective even after three years of its operations, he said. |
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