back to article Facebook reveals plan to WIRE THE PLANET

Facebook and fellow internet.org members Qualcomm and Ericsson have released a white paper that offers a blueprint for a massively scaled-up internet. Titled “A Focus on Efficiency” and available here as a PDF, the paper's premise is that internet.org members want to make sure the five billion folks currently offline get the …

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  1. jake Silver badge

    In otherwords ...

    ... Facebook and fellow internet.org memebers Qualcomm and Ericsson are trying to find a way to siphon funds out of 5 billion technologically illiterate people living below the poverty line.

    For shame.

    1. Denarius Silver badge

      Re: In otherwords ...

      they are acting as modern corporate law states they must, profit above all that they can get away with. Ethics are not laws, merely in the mind of the beholder. just ask the Nork emperor god. Unless one believes in absolutes that is, in which case modern toleration deems one intolerant/denialist of truth of week/fav pejorative here.

      As for whether being "connected " is a good thing, just found my copy of Clifford Stolls "Silicon Snake Oil". It has aged well in its assessments. Mobile phone access would be far more useful, but then, I don't own tech shares.

    2. Tom Samplonius

      Re: In otherwords ...

      "... Facebook and fellow internet.org memebers Qualcomm and Ericsson are trying to find a way to siphon funds out of 5 billion technologically illiterate people living below the poverty line."

      Translation: Poor people don't need Internet. Anyone that comes up technical solutions to make a less expensive Internet, should ashamed for allowing poor people access to these things.

      Rather paternalistic, don't you think? Are you also still waiting for India to come to their senses and rejoin the Empire too?

      1. jake Silver badge

        "Allowing", Tom Samplonius? Really? (was: Re: In otherwords ...)

        "Anyone that comes up technical solutions to make a less expensive Internet, should ashamed for allowing poor people access to these things."

        The 5 billion targeted marks HAVE NO EXTRA CASH! They are living well below the poverty-line, and face it, this thing called "The Internet" is hardly useful in their day-to-day lives.

        At school, provisionally yes. At home? Not so much. Which is what they are talking about.

        Big bidness is trying to siphon funds from poor people. Is that really all that hard to understand?

        1. Wanda Lust

          Re: "Allowing", Tom Samplonius? Really? (was: In otherwords ...)

          ...and that lack of any spare cash is exactly why no inexpensive/cheap iPhone appeared last week. If they can't afford the phone they certainly can't afford the apps, tunes, ebooks, magazine subscriptions, movies, epay lattes, etc.

        2. G 14

          Re: "Allowing", Tom Samplonius? Really? (was: In otherwords ...)

          Knowledge is power (just ask google/facebook et al) so I would say the internet could be extremely useful in their day-to-day lives..

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: "Allowing", Tom Samplonius? Really? (was: In otherwords ...)

            "Re: "Allowing", Tom Samplonius? Really? (was: In otherwords ...)

            Knowledge is power (just ask google/facebook et al) so I would say the internet could be extremely useful in their day-to-day lives.."

            I'm looking at Google (I assume you are wittering about Google+) and Faecebook. All I can see is an irrelevance to almost every aspect of day-to-day lives, especially those of the poor and technologically disenfranchised.

            OTOH, if it is felt really necessary to give the poor and technically illiterate the same kind of "advantages" (Someone please explain wnat they may be) of Faecebook and Googlesplurge, then the simplest solution and one with the lowest total cost of ownership is to hand out tin megaphones:

            "Just bought down a monkey for dinner" "any chance of rain?"

      2. JP19

        Re: In otherwords ...

        "Translation: Poor people don't need Internet."

        I'm rich and don't need effing facebook.........

        1. naw

          Re: In otherwords ...

          "Translation: Poor people don't need Internet."

          "I'm rich and don't need effing facebook........."

          Nobody _needs_ facebook - it is neither a requirement or an enhancement to life - just an alternative to having one. Truly rich people (define that any way you want) don't spend any time on facebook - it's too full of wannabe's.

  2. Wanda Lust

    Alt approach

    Alt method to reduce the chatter to mobile devices:

    Reduce, or selectively filter out, updates fed to mobile devices.

    Oh, too late, Farcebook's doing that already.

  3. stucs201

    Best way to use bandwidth more efficiently?

    Stop filling it with adverts and save it for actual wanted content.

    1. ravenviz Silver badge

      Re: Best way to use bandwidth more efficiently?

      Agreed, giving more people the internet just keeps spam in business. Not very much research shows that spam already occupies 50 - 90% of internet traffic so in future it's 50 - 90% of more traffic.

    2. Kilroy2k1

      Re: Best way to use bandwidth more efficiently?

      Ban ads and stop data slurping for useless marketing profiling. I'm sure that would improve bandwidth at least 40% on existing lines.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    HOT NEWS! Come and get it!

    Two big cops want to sell more stuff, sociopathic voyeur want to see you bare all.

  5. Jan Hargreaves
    FAIL

    WebP - So that's why images uploaded to facebook so are so horribly compressed and smallish text is almost unreadable. Yup, what innovation.... Go Zuck!

    1. dssf

      Harvesting/Hoarding Trend?

      If you are correct, it might be a slow trend toward data hoarding to ward off others' data harvestng efforts.

      Look at how they've jumbled-up the users' friends listing, making them randomized and repeating. Sorely screws up even a legit user's efforts to keep track of ones' bazillion friends. It's a PITA with just a hundred friends. Imagine the hell of sorting and dumping for spreadsheet or database use one's 500+ friends...

  6. IGnatius T Foobar
    FAIL

    3rd World Facebook FAIL

    Isn't it so wonderful of Zuck to want to bring Faecesbook to the third world, so they can play Farmville and have whiny teenage drama. You'd think they'd actually be more interested in having food, clean water, and shelter.

    1. Pascal Monett Silver badge
      Trollface

      And you'd be WRONG. They, just like any other normal FB customer, are much more interested in sharing details of their lives on a day-to-day basis. Such as, which new parasite they picked up this morning on their daily 5km walk to get water (and a wifi connection), who they saw get shot on the way, and btw, has anyone caught anything yesterday, or do we have to eat more kava bread again ?

      1. ravenviz Silver badge

        I thought they ate maggoty bread in Middle Earth?

  7. 02X7Cm

    underlying costs of delivering data

    I wholeheartedly agree that in order to get the rest of the world connected - the "underlying costs of delivering data" must come down.

    However I fail to see a connection between the underlying cost of delivering data and effiency. Personally I believe many properly created and maintained websites and apps already deliver data efficiently enough by compressing data.

    What is the problem in the ROTW however and where the "underlying cost" has a direct relationship with, is the number of underwater cables and cost of tier-1 connectivity. I hope Google and Facebook and other big internet tech giants would invest in more underwater cables AND expose them to third-parties in order to reduce the regional cost of data. The DC/telco/cabling game is currently really dirty in many regions and suffers from protectionism and under investment, that is in my opinion the real underlying cost of delivering data.

  8. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

    Meanwhile, lawfare

    Israeli NGO (more like QUANGO, amIrite) threatens to sue Facebook for hosting Iranian ministers

    Legal Action Center on Monday threatened to sue Facebook if it does not immediately and permanently take down a social media site recently provided to “15 ministers of Iran.”

    A letter from Shurat Hadin to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and general counsel Colin Stretch noted that the state and government of Iran are under “numerous sanctions by the United States government.”

    Next, Shurat Hadin said that various laws, presidential executive orders and regulations administered by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) of the US Department of the Treasury make it illegal “to export or supply goods, technology or services” to Iran or its government.

  9. bill 20

    "The paper also suggests wiser uses of networks"...

    ....Of which Facebook is most definitely not one.

    The improved communications that a computer network could bring to the inhabitants of the developing world might have the potential to improve their standard of living in real, tangible ways.

    But then the only reason capitalist economies would lay out the expense of setting up such networks would be to extract what little wealth those people have, in exchange for the pointless crap that the likes of Facebook and Amazon peddle.

  10. dssf

    "It is critical to wake the radio as seldom as possible"

    " Consequently, it is critical to wake the radio as seldom as possible and send as much network traffic each time as possible, while maintaining the feeling of freshness and recency in the UI. One way we’ve tackled this is by pre-fetching multiple images at a time that your friends have posted instead of waking up the radio separately for each image fetch."

    Hardly any news or stunning discovery. Many sites have offered "digests" for decades. Saves on landline bandwith and mobile bandwidth.

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