Will Facebook leverage the connection to the rest of the world that has scarce or no internet access?

Facebook has a campaign that goes by the name Internet.org. The main aim of this campaign is to connect the five billion people in the world that to date have poor, inadequate, sparse and expensive or nonexistent access to the internet.
The focal point of Internet.org's campaign is on developing countries. Continents like Africa and some parts of Asia will be beneficiaries. In this blog, I once posted an article goes with the title "Towards a better internet in Africa" , I discussed the ratio of internet users to the overall population of some African countries and compared them to the same statistics of some European countries. From the figures, it's obvious showing how the service hasn't been pervasive, cheap and reliable. Somehow we can put a bet that Zuckerberg is coming with the solution of the enigma. Their much focus is to make the cost of connection much way cheaper, cost of devices such as smartphones should be less so more and more people can find an affordability, creating a network that can support large amounts of data, making the internet access to be ubiquitous and making internet contents to be available in local language.

Zuckerberg explaining about Internet.org

 

The social network giant is not alone in this campaign. It has partnered with other mobile tech companies such as Nokia, Samsung, Qualcomm, Opera and Ericsson. On one side of the coin they are associates but when the coin gets a flip, you see them as competitors in business, think of the competition between Samsung and Nokia in smartphones business. Leaving that behind, let's consider how this collaboration will go about. For this project to reach accomplishment there should be new telecommunication infrastructures that can bring better and cheaper connection to the web. I think that's why Qualcomm and Ericsson are involved; they are experts in the field.

But having cheap access to the internet  is by itself not enough. Access devices like smartphones have to be cheap enough. Many of the smartphone makers in Internet.org have very cheap internet capable models. But not all of them are satisfying. Samsung's Galaxy Pocket series are quite cheap but they are just not capable of providing a decent mobile experience in today's age. The real star of the show has to be the Nokia Lumia 520. Re-retailed at a high price won't help solve the problem. That's why you see Nokia and Samsung on board. Opera is there to make sure any device that is associated with this project gets a privilege of the best internet browsing experience.

In light of the goals of Internet.org, Facebook's recent acquisition of Whatsapp makes a lot of sense. During the acquisition announcement,  Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg explained that "Whatsapp has many users especially in developing countries", and these are places considered for the campaign. He went on to say that " I proposed that if Facebook and Whatsapp joined, that would help connect the rest of the world and could help out with things like Internet.org by bringing these two very different communication tools together".

In most of developing countries, people use Facebook and Whatsapp as their daily communication tools. If you want to develop a better online environment for these people, you must be very close to what brings them into online social interaction, that's Whatsapp and Facebook.

If there is pervasive and cheap access, sand and  access devices such as smartphones and computers get cheaper, it would no doubt have a ripple effect in other areas such an ease of provision of health services. E-commerce will rapidly grow, education would also improve and online communication as a whole will easily accessible.