Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg's Mobile World Congress keynote doesn't begin for a few hours but he already announced Monday morning the creation of the Telecom Infra Project to better help connect people with Internet.org.
"Today we’re taking the next step by partnering with telecom companies to develop new technologies that will reduce the cost of building mobile networks all over the world," Zuckerberg said on a Facebook post. "... This new effort will follow the same principles of open technology design and collaboration, and we hope the cost savings from greater efficiency will be passed along to people by making their data plans cheaper and making it affordable for operators to extend their networks to places it hasn't traditionally been cost effective to do so."
Zuckerberg and Facebook launched Internet.org in August 2013 as a project to help provide Internet access in under served parts of the world. It works with companies like Samsung and Qualcomm to bridge the digital divide.
"Internet.org is made up of many separate programs, including a few focused on developing new types of infrastructure to connect people in the world's most remote communities," Zuckerberg said Monday. "Through ideas like solar-powered aircraft and satellites that can beam down Internet through lasers, and community Wi-Fi hotspots, we can reach communities that are difficult or expensive to reach with traditional infrastructure."
Zuckerberg said the inspiration for the Telecom Infra Project is the Open Compute Project, which "we open sourced our server, network and data centers designs to promote collaboration that has led to faster innovation and billions of dollars in efficiency savings across the industry"
The Telecom Infra Project aims to make data plans in underdeveloped parts of the world available at reasonable prices. Zuckerberg said he will provide further details during his MWC keynote, which starts at 18:00 CET (12 p.m. EST).
Stay with iDigialTimes for updates about Zuckerberg's latest initiative along with continued live coverage of MWC 2016 in Barcelona.
