Comment by tguvot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tguvot | Hacker News Reader

Gamarjoba,

I think what you are doing is very important thing but it's not scalable to 2.5b people.

The biggest problem for those 2.5b people are:

- Availability of network infrastructure. It starts with whatever network backbone and ends with either mobile internet or wifi network. In most cases there is no business case to build out this kind of infrastructure as there is essentially no way to recover investment unless its subsidized by government or world bank or something.

- Availability of electricity. There is many place that simply has none or it's very unreliable. It has twofold influence - its hard to build infrastructure that will work and people have no place to charge phones/laptops

- The actual price of devices. Even if you are talking about advanced feature phones or low end smart phones (laptops are way out of price range for most of 2.5b people) its still expensive. There is all kind of schemes with operators subsidizing the device over few years but it's bring arpu to very low numbers making it hardly viable business.

Edit. I actually lived in Georgia during the "fun" time, late 80s - early 90s. Good luck.

Gamarjoba:) We've researched this issue thoroughly and the infrastructure is not an issue. While 50% of the world's population lacks internet access only 15% live out of the coverage area of 3/4 G networks. This is actually where the number 2.5 Bn comes from. The main challenge is the affordability of monthly internet fees and of course devices. We actually solve both problems by providing devices and an internet connection.

Electricity might be an issue in some areas but according to our assumptions, more than 160 million secondary students in low and low-middle income countries live in cities and areas where electricity is not an issue.

Btw by working with the local communities, providing resources, training and constant assistance, we also seem to encourage them to see the relevance of an Internet connection. We hope to prove that most of our beneficiaries will be willing to continue paying for their Internet fees long after we have stopped paying for them. According to preliminary studies most of the families are ready to reprioritize their costs and maintain an internet connection.

The "Fun" times you mentioned is one of the reasons why we've started GiveInternet.org since we have experienced first-hand the transformational power of connectivity in improving people's lives.

I'll disagree. I worked previously "somewhere" that had yearly budget of tens of millions of dollars in order to tackle this specific issue - bringing internet to people that do not have it. We had extremely good data, most of which not available publicly; dozen(s) of people working solely on identifying scope of problem while other people trying to come up with solutions.

I don't have the data anymore so I can argue with you on exact numbers , but even when you are talking about 3/4g networks, in most of the cases it will be 3g and rolling out 4g is too expensive and backbone wont have enough capacity to serve all the people that are lacking access.

>Electricity might be an issue in some areas but according to our assumptions, more than 160 million secondary students in low and low-middle income countries live in cities and areas where electricity is not an issue.

You cant really just buy enough hardware for everyone. It doesn't work well on scale. See one laptop per child.

I understand and maybe 2.5 Bn might be under question.

But lets just to narrow it down to one country - US. One of the worlds strongest economy. Only in the US more than 3 million families with school-aged children can't afford internet connection (Sprint claims it's 5 Mio families) That's why these programs exist: http://1millionproject.org/, https://www.internetessentials.com/, https://www.fcc.gov/general/lifeline-program-low-income-cons...

Now imagine other countries and cities even developed ones. Not talking about developing countries. Btw 160 million secoindary students which I mentioned exclude rural areas, only those who live in urban areas.

Regarding the devices, I agree that might be challenging but the prices for devices are decreasing dramatically. Plus some models of monthly installments can make it plus 5-10 USD to monthly internet fees, which is pretty acceptable. So we believe in the long run the device problem is also solvable.

I actually live in US now. It's complicated over here. There are numbers that are talking about 20% of so that either cant afford or dont have in general access due to absence of infrastructure.

Will play devils advocate a bit: there is a lot of projects that attempt sponsoring model. Why one should choose yours over, lets say, this one https://www.worldvision.org/sponsor-a-child-in-africa .

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