Nationwide Wifi Could Come to Sri Lanka, Connecting Areas Isolated From Tech Boom

KARANGODA, SRI LANKA — It was March, and Hirusha Dilmin was eager to access the government’s Department of Examination website to see the results of his recent school exams.

For the 17-year-old, the results would determine whether he would continue his studies.

Dilmin lives with his parents and older sister in Karangoda, a village in Ratnapura district. His house is set in the middle of small tea and rubber plantations and surrounded by hills. There, he tried to get online using his smartphone.

“There was no signal inside the house and I really wanted to know if I passed,” he says.

So he did what he usually has to do to get online. He clambered up the rocky hill behind his house until he was at a point where he could get a strong-enough 3G wireless signal, he says.

There, at that high point, he discovered that he’d passed his exams.

Sri Lanka leads South Asia in connecting people to the internet and improving its features but the government hasn’t been able to connect the entire island online.

Now, a collaborative project between Project Loon, a project from X, formerly known as Google X, and the Sri Lankan government, is set to change this status quo. Project Loon is a planned network of balloons which will float in the stratosphere, providing internet services in areas which are not covered by conventional telecommunication towers.

The project launched in Sri Lanka in July 2015 and experiments began in 2016. The Sri Lankan government expects initial internet access to be available by 2017.

Once implemented, Sri Lanka will have complete internet coverage throughout the island, says Gavashkar Subramanium, information infrastructure program manager at the Information and Communication Technology Agency of Sri Lanka or ICTA, as it’s more commonly known.

The ICTA is the Sri Lankan government’s implementing party for Project Loon in Sri Lanka.

If nationwide internet is achieved, Sri Lanka will be a pioneer in providing such connectivity.

“Through Google Loon, everyone in the country will get equal opportunity to access internet,” Subramanium says.

Some people in Sri Lanka had access to the internet before the mid-1990s, including academics, but most ordinary Sri Lankans were first connected in April 1995.

In 1996, there were 2,504 internet and email subscribers in Sri Lanka, accessing from fixed lines, according to data from the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission of Sri Lanka. By December 2015, this number had grown to more than 4 million subscribers, accessing the internet from both fixed lines and mobile phones.

Telecommunication towers are expensive and difficult to place in mountainous terrain, Subramanium says. As a result, most telecommunication companies place the towers in cities and semi-urban areas.

“We have infrastructure issues in many parts of Sri Lanka,” he says. “Most remote areas in the country do not have good connectivity.”

Project Loon began with testing in New Zealand in June 2013 and has since been tested in other places. Ultimately, Project Loon could provide internet access to 4 billion people, Astro Teller, head of the organization formerly known as Google X, said in a TED talk earlier this year.

A helium-filled Loon balloon entered Sri Lankan airspace on February 15. It later landed in Gampola, in the Central Province of the country, Subramanium says.

There’s some debate as to whether that test was successful. Local media reported the landing as a crash, but the ICTA and Project Loon refuted this. Project Loon officials told GPJ in an emailed statement that the landing was planned.

The Sri Lankan government has a 25 percent stake in the Project Loon venture in Sri Lanka, in return for allocating spectrum for the project, Subramanium says.

Some Sri Lankans are already planning how they’ll leverage countrywide internet access.

K.P. Hewagamage, a senior lecturer at the University of Colombo School of Computing and coordinator of its e-Learning Centre, says Project Loon will enable more people to enroll in online courses.

“If students who drop out are given a platform to study the same course online, then they will be qualified to secure good jobs,” Hewagamage says. “But for this, a total internet coverage is essential and costs must be minimal because most students from rural areas are coming from very poor backgrounds.”

Right now, only students who live in urban and semi-urban areas can access distance learning courses, he says.

Project Loon won’t directly eliminate every barrier to online education.

One such student is 17-year-old Madushika Rangani, who studies music at Karangoda Maha Vidyalaya in Ratnapura.

“I want to learn more about music so that I can be a very good music teacher,” she says. “If I have internet at home I can go through different forms of music than what is taught at school.”

If Project Loon provides free internet in Sri Lanka, she says she hopes the prices of laptops and tablets will drop.

Rangani says her family lives on her father’s income as a rubber estate worker. They can’t even afford a smartphone, she says.

But Sanjana Hattotuwa, senior researcher at the Centre for Policy Alternatives, a local think tank, says there’s no evidence that Project Loon will drive the prices of computers and other devices down.

Hattotuwa is also the founding editor of Groundviews, a citizen journalism initiative.

It’s not clear exactly what the project could provide Sri Lankans, he says.

“It is a very interesting technology,” he says. “But the question is where these balloons are going to be placed.”

The country’s hilly regions have poor voice and internet coverage, he says.

“If, hypothetically, Google Loons will be placed above these areas and cater to probably the most underserved areas in the country in terms of telecommunications, that will actually be genuinely useful,” he says.

The government has a clear plan for how Project Loon will benefit Sri Lanka, says Harin Fernando, the Minister of Telecommunication and Digital Infrastructure.

Through the project, telecommunications providers will be able to provide high-speed internet to users, and that widespread coverage will push connectivity costs down, he says.

That will bring new options for digital learning, he says, adding that the government hopes to leverage full internet coverage to introduce new concepts in education.

But the government recognizes that having devices to access the internet, especially for students, will be a challenge, Fernando says. The ministry is planning to launch a pilot project this year to provide tablets to some students from nine schools, one in each of Sri Lanka’s nine provinces, to encourage them to communicate via internet, he says.

Subramanium says the details of how Project Loon will benefit the country will become clear as the project moves from experimental stage to more complete trials and pilots.

Although its too early to indicate a time frame for when Project Loon will be operational in Sri Lanka, the project is progressing well, Subramanium says.

The project team is currently in discussions with telecommunications companies in Sri Lanka so that trials can begin, he says.

 

Aanya Wipulasena, GPJ, translated two interviews from Sinhala.