Mobile communications and Internet in Sri Lanka

Internet speed for cell phones and fixed network

With an average download speed of 20.49 Mbit/second for fixed-network broadband internet, Sri Lanka ranks 131st in an international comparison. The upload rate of only 5.5 Mbit/second was significantly lower (156th place).
In mobile internet, i.e., on tablets and smartphones, Sri Lanka comes 121st with a download speed of 15.46 Mbit/second. The upload speed of around 6 Mbit was only enough for 127th place.

The Speedtest Global Index published regularly by Ookla is based on several million individual measurements in April 2023 from 180 countries.

Mobile phone rates in Sri Lanka

Every year, the International Telecommunication Union calculates for many countries what a mobile phone contract costs to use. A monthly budget averaging US$ 3.70 was calculated Sri Lanka in 2021. This is about the same value as in the previous year.

The ITU refers to the costs for monthly use and includes 140 telephony minutes, 70 text messages and a data transfer of 2 GBytes. The transfer speed should be the minimum of a 3G connection, i.e. at least UMTS, which is already outdated in many parts of the world. 2 GBytes do not sound much. However, this is already quite a high consumption in a worldwide comparison. If one does not take a fixed amount in US dollars, but converts it to the economic output per inhabitant, a user in Sri Lanka spends 1.1% of his gross national income on mobile telephony. Worldwide, this rate is around 6.6 percent.

In the USA, the monthly cost was around $38.10.

Network coverage with 5G

In 2021, network coverage with the 5G standard was already 9 percent of all inhabitants. The proportion of the population with at least 4G mobile Internet access was 96.0 percent. The 4G network standard includes both LTE and WiMAX.

The following diagrams show the development of the various telephone and internet connections as a percentage of the country's population. Values above 100 percent mean that, on average, every inhabitant has more than one connection.

Access to the internet in Sri Lanka from 1990 - 2021

Broadband internet in Sri Lanka 2001 - 2021

Sri Lanka is lagging behind in the expansion of broadband internet connections. Around 67 percent of all residents have access to the internet. Around 11 percent have their own fast internet connection, which is at least faster than the former ISDN (more than 256 kbit/s). All fixed connections via DSL, cable or satellite were counted here, but not those connected to the internet via mobile communications.

The increasing prevalence of cell phones and the simultaneous decline in the number of fixed-network phones also indicate a change here. While the number of fixed-network phones has declined over the past few years, the number of cell phones has increased noticeably at the same time. Most recently, there were 139 cell phone contracts per 100 people. This trend can be observed worldwide, but is not yet as pronounced in Wakanda as in some other countries.

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