Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg hopes to make Internet available worldwide someday and believes recent acquisition WhatsApp will be key to that plan.
"It's easy to take for granted that most people in the world don't have access to the Internet at all," Zuckerberg said this week at the Mobile World Congress, as reported by ComputerWorld. "We're not really on a path to connect everyone unless something pretty dramatic changes."
Facebook purchased Silicon Valley startup WhatsApp last week for a record $16 billion, and Zuckerberg is calling the messaging service "the most engaging app that we've ever seen exist on mobile so far."
The social network and its cohorts believe that "someday someone should try and help connect everyone in the world," Zuckerberg said, adding the caveat that "we're probably going to lose money on this for quite a while."
According to Zuckerberg, the goal is a "dial tone for the Internet," something similar to the basic free phone service for 911 calls.
The plan is to connect everyone eventually with a low bandwidth that could handle such basic tasks as checking the weather or sending a text message, ComputerWorld reported.
"The most expensive part about owning a smartphone and being connected to the Internet isn't the smartphone, it's the data connection," Zuckerberg said, noting that around 80 percent of the world population lives in places where 2G or 3G connections are available.
Of simple features like messaging, Zuckerberg said, "These are just basic services that people should be able to access. They're all text-based, incredibly low-bandwidth and cheap to serve."
Internet.org calls the enterprise "a global partnership dedicated to making internet access available to the two thirds of the world not yet connected."
Facebook's engineers have been working to cut back on data usage. While the average Facebook member used around 14 MB of data a day last year, data use has since fallen to an average of 2 MB per day and should be down to 1 MB soon.
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