Facebook offers hosted platform in move to connect the unconnected
NICE, France – The TM Forum scored a significant membership win this week with social media giant Facebook joining the organization in a move to increase collaboration with telecom providers and expand its Internet.org initiative. The announcement was made at this week’s TM Forum Live event in Nice.
Facebook’s angle in joining the TM Forum is its interest in providing open access to the Internet.org program that is looking to expand Internet connectivity to two-thirds of the world’s population that is not yet connected. Markku Mäkeläinen, director of global operator partnerships at Facebook, cited mobility as being key to this expansion effort noting that 48% of Facebook users live within range of a 3G network, with 90% living within 2G coverage.
Those technology challenges are the basis for Internet.org working with a basic mobile website that does away with bandwidth intensive pictures and videos and focuses instead on providing free access to news, health, communication, education, job skills and employment information. The platform also looks to hurdle the language barrier by working with local operators to provide the websites in native languages.
Mäkeläinen also touched on the pricing challenge of mobile broadband access, noting that research has shown 80% of people in local markets can currently afford to pay for about 100 megabytes of data access per month, highlighting the need to keep bandwidth demand to a minimum.
“We need to work together as an industry to bridge the digital divide and connect the world,” Mäkeläinen said.
Facebook said it is working to scale Internet.org by making it easier for its partners to integrate services and attract more data users, which the company said currently includes 9 million customers.
“We are creating a new model to deploy these services,” Mäkeläinen said. “We’re starting to offer them in Africa soon and will be scaling these services globally throughout the rest of the year. We have been incorporating everything we have learned so far with our operators and have been building new infrastructure to smooth the path to launching these services everywhere.”
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