My not-so-unlimited internet experience

After 7 years of continuous service, I finally disconnected my Dialog 4G home broadband connection due to teething performance issues that Dialog just didn’t seem interested in fixing. The new connection I went for was SLT’s Fibre and the difference in speed was substantial. It was a night and day difference compared to the 4G connection I was using and I was impressed.

Switching to SLT Unlimited

I noticed that my usage would exceed the limits most months, leading me to add more data (more than a few times). This occurred fairly often and my end-of-the-month bills kept going up. That’s when I discovered that SLT was introducing unlimited packages. I was intrigued.

The limitations of the unlimited packages didn’t look too bad. The two packages I was interested in, Fibre Unlimited Flash 10 and Fibre Unlimited 10 had their own unique ups and downs. The latter seemed out of the question as its speed was capped at 10 Mbps. It just felt a bit silly. The former package had a cap of 10 gigabytes and when you surpassed the allocation, the speed drops to 1 Mbps.

I monitored my per-day data usage for a few weeks and noticed that the usage didn’t really exceed 10 gigabytes per day, most of the time. Due to rising costs with adding data, I finally decided to upgrade to the Fibre Unlimited Flash 10 connection at the end of last month using SLT’s mobile app. The package was changed at the beginning of October. This was a seamless process and SLT called me to confirm the change. I also unsubscribed from the Unlimited Entertainment package.

I started using the new package and nothing really felt different. At first. I was mostly doing work-related tasks and a little bit of YouTube and the data usage seemed to be under control. At the end of the first day, there was a fair amount of data left in the allocation, so I randomly downloaded some stuff to burn off the remaining data.

A limiting experience

The ball dropped the following day. We loaded up Netflix on the TV and ate through a huge chunk of the data allocation and the speed dropped to 1 Mbps immediately. This is when I thought that having the Unlimited Entertainment package active wasn’t a bad idea. So I loaded up the SLT app and discovered that I could not activate it on an unlimited connection.

Then I thought I could add some extra gigs to the connection as I did in the previous package so I could get some work done. That was also out of the question as these packages did not allow extra gigabytes. I later discovered that this was mentioned in the fine print but I digress.

So here I was, with a supposedly “unlimited” internet connection ticking at 1 Mbps. Unable to get anything useful done until midnight. I was not happy and I called SLT the following day to switch back to my previous package. I got through to an agent and explained my predicament and practically begged them to change it back, but they said it just wasn’t possible until the end of the month.

Stick with the normal packages

So that’s my story. In hindsight, I should’ve paid more attention to the fine print. But I feel that SLT should’ve made this a bit more obvious when the package was changed. I requested them to switch it back to an ordinary package and they said it’ll be done next month.

The previous ordinary package I used, ‘Web Booster,’ featured 85GB at day time and 120GB at night time at a cost of LKR 3490. Even though I had to add more data around the end of the month, I was able to schedule large downloads at night and this allowed me to get things like UHD movies or game installations very frequently. This is something that’ll be impossible with the cheaper unlimited connection.

The new package I chose to switch to has an allocation of 155GB without a day/night separation. When you directly compare that amount of data to the crippled unlimited package I used, you’d think that the unlimited package is better valued since 10GB x 30 days means 300 gigabytes. But when it comes to real-life usage, it just doesn’t hold up.

I really do wish us Sri Lankans would get real unrestricted internet packages one day, but I don’t think it’d happen anytime soon. For now, I guess the best we’ll get is the not-so-unlimited internet packages that are somehow worse than the normal packages.