Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg Wants To Bring Affordable Web To 5 Billion People

[engine]

Five billion people on Facebook, incredible, but doable, i'm sure, with the technology he speaks of.

"Our plan is to make basic Internet services affordable so that everyone with a phone can join the knowledge economy," Zuckerberg said. "In order for this to be economically feasible we need to make the Internet 100 times more affordable."

To bring down the price of Internet service, Zuckerberg suggested a combination of lowering the costs associated with infrastructure and the amount of data used.

To cut infrastructure costs, he said, cell phone towers need to be upgraded so signals can travel further, spectrum needs to be used more efficiently, and smartphone hardware prices need to be lowered. For data, he said that apps should cache data instead of request it and that compression algorithms should be used.Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg Wants To Bring Affordable Web To 5 Billion People [news.cnet.com]

[SevenCubed]

...and smartphone hardware prices need to be lowered.

Well for starters if he's really all about "the people", as opposed to only their faces, and sincere about what he's saying, then he should get in touch with Dave Hakkens of Phonebloks in the Netherlands to get the ball rolling on reducing hardware prices.

[BillyS]

To cut infrastructure costs, he said, cell phone towers need to be upgraded so signals can travel further, spectrum needs to be used more efficiently, and smartphone hardware prices need to be lowered.

Is Facebook going to subsidize cell phones or does he propose everyone along the value chain make less money?

And how does spending more money on cell towers result in less costs?

Laughable

[Panthro]

More people on the internet, more people on Facebook and/or their properties.