At Facebook’s first-quarter earnings call conference, held on 26th April 2018, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg gladly announced the news of serving near about 100 million people with internet accessibility. For the successful completion of the project initiated, all the credit goes to Facebook’s Internet society.
Our Internet.org efforts have helped almost 100 million people get access to the internet who may not have had it otherwise. – Mark Zuckerberg
Internet.org is a partnership between American online social media and social networking service company Facebook and six companies: Samsung, Ericsson, MediaTek, Opera Software, Nokia, and Qualcomm. This consortium was built with an intention to provide selected internet services mostly to underdeveloped countries, that too at a minimum cost. Internet.org access low-bandwidth services through its Free Basics app. In order to connect every possible corner of the earth, Facebook has also started testing Aquila, a solar drone from the company itself. These drones will work in secluded areas and will be able to bring the bandwidth down.
Some latest reports suggest that government approval will be needed to fly the drone and deliver LTE access, which is still pending. In earlier days, Facebook also tried its hands on lasers and satellites to get bandwidth in those places where mobile network is not available. As each and every network can’t be accessed through the Free Basics service, some experts believe that this violates the principle of network neutrality. As a result of such a perspective, the application got banned in India by the government.
Some payments experiment has been done by the company in some Asian country like the Philippines, where people are sanctioned to buy data plans through the messenger platform. This became possible due to the tie-up between Facebook and various mobile financial service companies.
Though Facebook has been hugely criticized over its privacy issues for the past several months, the initiative to deliver internet to every possible area taken by the company is surely praiseworthy.
