FACEBOOK’S AIM TO connect the world has taken one of its biggest step forward after it launched its free mobile internet service in India.
Internet.org, CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s project to get the world connected, launched its app to a country which has a population of 1.2 billion. Roughly a billion people in India don’t have access to the internet and Facebook plans to change that.
In a post announcing the news, Zuckerberg said that while it aims to change that, it has a long way to go before it achieves this aim.
Today’s announcement is just one step towards changing that. People on the Reliance network in the states of Tamil Nadu, Mahararashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Kerala and Telangana will now have free data access to more than three dozen services. We have a long way to go to connect India. But I’m optimistic that by getting free basic services into people’s hands, more change can follow pretty rapidly.
Of the 150 million people across Africa and Latin America using internet.org, 6 million hadn’t a connection before it arrived.
India has become a significant market for some of the biggest companies in the world. Last year, Google launched Android One, its way of getting cheap smartphones into the hands of billions of users, while Facebook recently launched a scaled-down version of its mobile app called Facebook Lite, which is only 286k in size.
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