The Internet is expensive. Sure, you may think that the $60 you pay a month for cable isn’t that much, but what about the estimated 5 billion people around the world who don’t even have access to basic Internet services. The costs of connecting those people to the world wide Web are immense, and nobody wants to foot the bill. That’s where Mark Zuckerberg’s Internet.org comes in.
You may recall that in late August, Zuckerberg started up a new initiative called Internet.org that would aim to connect the entire planet to the Internet. It’s an incredibly ambitious idea, and an expensive one at that. To help with the cost problem, he proposed a number of ideas that would drive down the price of data delivery. Now he’s back with an in-depth explanation of these proposals.
If you want a recap, Zuckerberg says that he’s planning on making the Internet 100 times more affordable in two ways. First, he’s going to make Internet delivery 10 times cheaper, and second, he’s going to make data ten times cheaper. He hopes to do this by building out better cell towers that can deliver stronger signals while making better use of the white spectrum currently available. As for data, he wants to use local caching and data compression to make sure that mobile devices only have to use 40 percent of the data that they currently use.
If these plans come to fruition, we may just have a world where the Internet is made available to more people. That’s only a good thing as increased Internet access will benefit everybody. To take an example from the above video, just imagine farmers in Africa being able to coordinate with agriculture scientists from halfway across the world on how to best increase crop yields. The same Internet access that we take for granted daily would be a revolutionary force of change in the lives of millions without it.
It’s still early days for Internet.org, however, and it’s going to need all the help it can get to achieve it’s goals. You can’t connect the entire world to the Internet overnight, but it’s something that’s well worth the time and effort.
[Image: Internet.org/YouTube]