LIRNEasia’s most recent colloquium, Mobile 2.0: m-money for the unbanked was held via Skype. Erwin Alampay (PhD) , LIRNEasia research fellow, presented his working paper mobile 2.0 on m-money, from Manila, Philippines, via Skype to participants in three separate locations: Colombo, Sri Lanka (at LIRNEasia’s office), Yunnan, China and Bangkok, Thailand.
Unlike previous virtual colloquia, where presenters (as well as participants) were abroad, this time, we were able to rely 100% on the Skype conference call. Just a few months ago for similar colloquia, we had to connect to the speaker through a (costly) overseas call on our fixed line phone. Though Skype’s Call Conferencing facility was available at that time, call quality was poor and smooth connectivity was rare.
We connected to Erwin through Skype calling, and other participants were added on through Skype’s conference calling feature. The laptop running the conference call was connected to a set of speakers and a mic in LIRNEasia’s conference room.
The interesting part is that the router providing the Sri Lanka Telecom broadband link was two floors (i.e., two layers of concrete) above the conference room. During the colloquium (roughly 1.5 hours), the connection was lost just once. But within a few minutes connectivity was re-established and the colloquium proceeded.
This makes us wonder, has broadband quality in Sri Lanka improved? Or has
LIRNEasia’s benchmark reports on broadband quality of service experience has showed that Sri Lanka broadband download speeds actually did improve between February 2008 and 2009.
Download speed : From Feb 2008- Feb 2009 International
Or can it be that Skype has improved its product, in an attempt to capture the market ?
Whichever the reason is, we were able to conduct a colloquium very cost effectively and efficiently.
1 Comment
Sanjana Hattotuwa
Ranmalee,
Agree with your findings, but I think you mean latency, not the speed of downloads and uploads, when you talk about improvements in SLT’s ADSL connectivity. Latency has more impact on Skype call quality than bandwidth. Lirneasia’s research brings out that SLT’s ADSL’s is not bad in this regard in Feb ’08, on par with BSNL from Chennai. By Oct ’08 however, latency has got worse, for both SLT and Dialog connections tested.
This may indicate that Skype is now able to deal better with high latency connections. There has not been a single release of Skype that has not touted improvements to voice (and video) quality. Clearly, underlying A/V codecs are improving too, evident in products such as iChat on OS X as well.
I have used Skype on a Samsung i780 running Windows Mobile 6.1 and the beta version of Skype for Windows Mobile. Skype call quality over wifi as well as 3G on Dialog from Colombo is indistinguishable from Skype running on a PC connected to the ‘net via Dialog’s Wimax.
Good news for us. Bad news for mercenary telcos.
Sanjana