Sri Lanka Telecom’s nationwide migration from ageing copper telephone lines to Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) technology is being promoted as a major leap towards a faster and more resilient digital infrastructure. Yet beneath the technological transformation lies a financial question affecting potentially hundreds of thousands of long-standing customers: what happens to the refundable deposits they originally paid for copper connections?
SLT-MOBITEL is progressively replacing its legacy Megaline copper network with fibre, promising standard speeds of up to 300Mbps and premium packages reaching 1Gbps. The migration also removes vulnerabilities associated with copper infrastructure, including weather-related interruptions and lightning hazards.
However, customers migrating from existing copper connections are reportedly being treated as entering a new setup category, with a Rs.7,500 conversion or migration fee applicable to a standard line.
That raises a fundamental accountability issue. If a customer already paid a refundable deposit when obtaining the original copper connection, why should the transition to a technologically superior replacement network potentially leave that deposit outside the financial calculation?
The issue becomes more significant when SLT’s financial position is examined.
According to the company’s financial disclosures for the year ended December 31, 2025, the SLT Group held approximately Rs.516 million in subscriber deposits. Yet the published accounts do not provide a sufficiently transparent breakdown showing precisely how much of this amount relates to legacy copper-line customers.
The absence of such a breakdown makes it difficult for customers, regulators and even Parliament to determine the total financial value of deposits potentially affected by the migration programme.
The central unanswered question is equally straightforward: are the old deposits being refunded, transferred against the new connection cost, or written off?
A nationwide migration programme should not create a situation in which customers are required to pay a fresh migration charge while the financial treatment of money previously deposited with the telecom operator remains unclear.
The concern is not necessarily that SLT has improperly retained customer funds. Rather, the problem is the lack of a clearly communicated, universal mechanism demonstrating what happens to those funds when copper services are terminated.
The scale of the infrastructure transition makes transparency particularly important. More than 1.15 million active copper connections remain targeted for eventual migration, while fibre already represents 19.2% of fixed-access lines.
SLT commissioned more than 94,000 new active FTTH connections during the latest fiscal year, demonstrating how rapidly the transition is accelerating.
With millions of customer transactions potentially unfolding over the lifetime of the programme, a transparent deposit reconciliation mechanism is essential.
SLT should publicly disclose the value of copper-line deposits, explain the contractual basis for their treatment, and establish an automatic refund or transfer mechanism where applicable.
The fibre revolution may be technologically overdue. But digital progress should not come at the expense of financial transparency.