Facebook Details Internet.org Plans to Bridge the Digital Divide

A global effort to make Internet access affordable for everyone or a plan for world domination: Whatever your take is on Facebook's Internet.org initiative, you'll find Facebook's detailed plan an enlightening read.

In August 2013, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled "Internet.org," a multi-company initiative to expand the mobile Internet (and Facebook access) to developing countries. Getting together the likes of Qualcomm, Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung, and others, Facebook wants to make internet access "available to the next 5 billion people."

"Everything Facebook has done has been about giving all people around the world the power to connect," said Zuckerberg in his announcement, "There are huge barriers in developing countries to connecting and joining the knowledge economy. Internet.org brings together a global partnership that will work to covercome these challenges, including making internet access available to those who cannot currently afford it."

If expanding internet access to two-thirds of the planet sounds ambitious, you might be interested in the 70-page white paper that Facebook, Ericsson and Qualcomm just released, called, "A Focus on Efficiency." In it, Facebook gets technical about how, with the right initiatives, "it is reasonable to expect the overall efficiency of delivering data to increase by 100x in the next 5-10 years."

Some of those initiatives and innovations include using data compression and caching systems to reduce server data flow, slimming down the amount of data apps requires, and using shared download systems to reduce the amount of data wireless providers need to feed to a given area. "Our goal is to provide a good product, but scaled down in a way that allows it to work well in a network constrained and price sensitive environment," said Facebook in the Internet.org paper.

In the paper, Facebook also gives details about the efficiencies it had to innovate and put in place as the social network grew - which Facebook sees as a good starting point and road map for the future of cheap Internet for all. For example, though Facebook has expanded to a point where users upload more than 350 million photos per day, on average, on top of the 250 billion photos that have already been uploaded to the site, several improvements in the underlying coding and execution process has allowed Facebook to realize a 500 percent increase in speed compared to its old system. And that's just one example; Facebook goes all the way down to the nitty-gritty details, like how to optimize data centers for better power management and which image formats are likely to be most efficient.

Qualcomm and Ericsson have written two chapters in the white paper explaining their respective initiatives, including Qualcomm's plan to expand global wireless capacity by 1000 times and Ericsson's exploration of wireless operator "best practices."

For idealists who are looking for the practical ways to expand access to the global modern economy, or business managers who are looking for a sneak peak into the technical details of how Facebook manages to continuously expand its already humongous social network (or just for curious internet geeks), you can find the white paper here.