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.
My respect for Huawei goes back to 2002-04 when I was responsible for telecom reforms in government. They never approached me to lobby for anything. But I asked them what the per-line costs they could offer on CDMA. Their response knocked my socks off. One of the two companies that got the first blocks of spectrum for CDMA went for Huawei.