Reliance
Communications and Facebook have partnered to bring Internet.org to
India. Internet.org is Mark Zuckerberg’s initiative to provide free
internet to mobile phone users in developing countries, where Facebook
partners with telecom service providers and content partners.
Internet.org
aims to connect Reliance Communications (RCom) subscribers to free
internet – although only across their list of 33 websites and services.
The bouquet of services span across genres having a healthy mix of news
websites such as BBC News, IBNLive, Times of India; educational services
such as Wikipedia, Translator, wikiHow; sports websites; Health and
welfare services such as BabyCentre, iLearn, Socialblood and so on.
According
to RCom, these services will be available for free to RCom subscribers.
You can either log on to www.internet.org or call 1800 300 25353 which
is a toll free number, to get Internet.org activated. Reliance has said
that Internet.org works as a mobile website on feature phones, whereas
with Android phones, you can download an Internet.org app.
On
logging into Internet.org, you are presented with two tabs – Free
Services and Reliance. The Free services tab, as the name implies
comprises the 33 content partners and services which Facebook and
Reliance have partnered with to provide free internet access. At the
moment there are 33 services, across languages such as English, Hindi,
Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Gujarati and Marathi. More services and
languages will be added in a phased manner.
It
is interesting to note that Facebook has only given Facebook Messenger
and a lite version of the Facebook app for Internet.org. There are no
other social networks on board at the moment, not even Facebook owned
messaging service WhatsApp. Even with Facebook, there is a catch. For an
image heavy social network, RCom will only offer you the option to read
and post status messages, like or comment on statuses and pictures. But
the pictures themselves will appear blurred and to download these
images, you will either need a data plan, or you can activate data
connection for Rs 9 per day or Rs 15 for a 15-day pack.
The
Reliance tab advertises RCom’s data plans which includes 2G Pack (1GB
2G data pack with free Twitter / Facebook / WhatsApp for Rs 9 for one
day), Facebook Pack (Rs 15, unlimited Facebook access for 15 days),
WhatsApp pack (Rs 15, Unlimited for 15 days) and so on.
RCom
has assured that Internet.org will work with any internet-enabled
phone, which includes smartphones as well as feature phones. It will
appear as a mobile website for most phones. The Internet.org app is only
available on the Android platform at the moment. There was no word out
on when it will be available on other platforms, so people using other
mobile OS, will have to go online via the Internet.org mobile website
only.
Bing
is the default search engine. Facebook has also partnered with the
government of Andhra Pradesh to come up with the app APSpeaks. This app
lets regular citizens put forth their greviances to the Andhra Pradesh
government.
Page-loading
on the smartphones wasn’t much of an issue, but with a feature phone,
the page loading was painfully slow. Of course, there are a lot of
factors which can affect page-loading speeds such as network
connectivity as well as the make of the phone. But the demo showed to us
had a two-year old feature phone which took over a minute to load a
text-heavy page.
According
to Facebook, it has worked with a lot of content partners to help
optimise the content in a way that uses limited bandwidth. RCom
representatives would not give an exact number of data transfer speeds
one can expect with Internet.org.
The
service has apparently gone live for all RCom users in Mumbai. The
rollout for Maharashtra, Kerala and Gujarat will happen tonight with
other states expected to get on board soon.
Posted by : Gizmeon
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