The Telecommunications Regulatory Commission of Sri Lanka (TRCSL) should be serving the people by reducing broadband prices and improving Internet speeds but the Commission seems to have forgotten its main objective and swung away into making more money for the Inland Revenue by regulating what people should do and how they should do it.
Banning the import of mobile phones without TRCSL approval stating it as a “Health risk” was one of the first actions. Mobile phones on the international market are far cheaper and provides a better range for consumers to chose from, instead of the fairly limited range available locally. However this ability is no longer possible in Sri Lanka. The argument of radiation values and cancers is not convincing due to the fact that brain tumours have been found on people who never used a mobile phone. If the health risk was the issue, they could have set up monitoring stations to approve mobiles at customs locations instead of just banning it all together.
Another issue was broadband speed limits. The TRCSL has stepped into forcing operators to stay above a green line on speed provided to a user. This is a good thing, but given the fact that they lowered broadband prices and asked the operators to increase speeds the operators have come to a bottleneck where they cannot provide this speed to all users. Thus operators have marked a majority of users who use large volumes of data as heavy users and slowed them down so that they can stay above the green line. These sudden actions by both TRCSL and broadband operators without proper planning and feasibility study have driven a portion of consumers into great confusion and inconvenience.
A Gigabyte of data in the country now costs around Rs. 300. Looking at the total usages of consumers it is clearly visible that many cannot afford such massive bills. In this calamity, operators have implemented unacceptable Fair User Policies to unlimited usage packages providing a limited but unlimited service in terms of the law. Higher Flat rate to all consumers is a must for operators to keep services truly unlimited. TRCSL's perspective is to charge per Gigabyte thus giving more revenue to the state.
VoIP or Voice over Internet Protocol became an extremely popular method to provide cheap international calls, but sadly as these calls don’t pay revenue to the government and due to the fact that local operators lose markets as they cannot provide these cheap rates, TRCSL decided to ban VoIP on Internet Services. Now TRCSL is stepping into the banning of foreign Satellite TV services again pointing to the fact of “local operators lose markets, and no state revenue” forgetting that most operators in the country don’t give the consumer all the channels he or she wants.
TRCSL has today effectively regulated the consumer like a caged animal and has removed his/her freedom to choice products and services and limiting access to technology but while increasing government revenue, which begs the question, why was the TRCSL established in the first place?
Chirantha
Amerasinghe,
Colombo |
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