Facebook exerting pressure on telecom equipment suppliers to bring down costs


Posted on May 29, 2016  /  0 Comments

As a pro-poor, pro-market organization we are always interested in how costs of connectivity can be reduced, because then we would have sustainable connectivity for the poor, who will hopefully cease to be poor in the process.

Mark Zuckerberg’s ideas are of great interest:

It should not be surprising, then, that Mr. Zuckerberg is relying on open source to reduce the price of building and running the world’s telecommunications networks, a business estimated to be worth about $150 billion a year.

“Our rule is 10 times faster or 10 times cheaper or both,” said Jay Parikh, Facebook’s vice president for engineering. “We want to get a full Facebook experience to every end user, whether that is video, or eventually virtual reality.”

Established telecommunications companies are moving fast to adjust. Nokia, the Finnish company, joined Facebook in February at the announcement of the Telecom Infra Project, or TIP, a Facebook-led group that is trying to reduce telecom costs. Cisco Systems intends to start donating software to TIP, hoping to profit from heavy overall usage on the world’s big telecom systems.

Image source.

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