After cringing at the stereotypical videos of poor kids on bikes, a barber doing his job, and tea plantation workers on Internet.org, I was trying to find out what exactly do they have in mind beyond the hyperbole of "making internet access available to the next 5 billion people".
It turns out, most of the technical stuff they are considering are pure wireless stuff, including topics such as using spectrum more efficiently and utilizing white space bands. Some key point from Facebook's white paper:
- Wireless repeaters: "...when an operator broadcasts a signal, it loses fidelity as it penetrates building walls. This not only requires operators to build out much more infrastructure in greater proximity than should be necessary, but it also means that data needs to be retransmitted when the signal breaks down, and the overall infrastructure is taxed by sending the same data multiple times."
- Edge Caching: "It is also possible to build technology that caches data inside an operator’s data center and makes it faster and cheaper for the operator to serve that data. "
- White Space: "Specifically, there is a policy movement to reallocate spectrum that has been used as a buffer around TV broadcasting."
- Reduce data usage in apps: "At Facebook, we’re investing heavily in opportunities to reduce our overall data use and help other apps reduce their data use as well. Some of the areas we’re focused on are caching, data compression and simple efficiency optimizations."
- Data caching: "People with feature phones are very cost conscious, so one of the most important things we’ve done has been to make this experience use as little data as possible by caching data efficiently so we can be very careful about which data we ever have to request from our servers."
- Data Compression: "Implementing compression in large scale apps or developing services that you route all your data through and compress everything would yield large data use savings."
- Efficient coding to reduce data: "Since most developers of large scale services are based in developed countries where data usage is a less important aspect of performance than, say, speed or server efficiency, we’ve found that many frequently used apps have had little or no data usage optimization."
- Peer-to-Peer Wireless: "There are also more speculative approaches we’re investigating, including enabling people to download some News Feed stories and photos from their friends’ nearby phones over Wifi Direct and other local network technologies."
- Zero-rating data: "We’ve already seen results where attaching free data for Facebook — what we’ve historically called zero-rating — increases both phone sales profits and data plan profits."
Looking at these (still hazy) details, and the list of partners, it seems like the Internet.org initiative will be more about incremental technical advancements in the general area of wireless networks and mobile Internet. In any case, I think this initiative is only partly inside Facebook's current comfort zone and we might see a lot of false starts and new developments as they get more comfortable with the whole providing-cheap-connectivity space.
