Data compression
Compression is another big lever for reducing overall data use. The main reasons many app
developers don’t compress the data they serve is that doing so requires some effort to build,
makes code marginally harder to debug and has a small negative impact on performance.
However, in data conscious developing countries, this is a large opportunity.
Modern text compression frequently yields results of %)*.)% — or almost #x savings —
and in some cases even more. Implementing compression in large scale apps or developing
services that you route all your data through and compress everything would yield large data
use savings.

Efficiency optimization
Another, less elegant but necessary tactic is just focusing on making the most frequently used
apps consume less data in the first place. Since most developers of large scale services are
based in developed countries where data usage is a less important aspect of performance than,
say, speed or server efficiency, we’ve found that many frequently used apps have had little or
no data usage optimization.
For example, at the beginning of this year, our Facebook for Android app used about !$MB per
day on average. This is a lot, but it’s not completely unreasonable given the number of photos
in the typical experience. By simply focusing on improving data usage, we expect to be able to
reduce this to about !MB per day. If we offer a special variant with fewer photos in developed
countries, we will be able to reduce it even further. But even without that, we expect to be able
to reduce our data usage by more than 10x through this effort alone.

Helping businesses drive access

In addition to all the technology improvements that are necessary to make internet access
available to everyone, there are also social and cultural issues that are necessary to overcome.
If you’ve grown up in an area where you’ve never had a computer or access to the internet,
then if someone asks you if you want a data plan, chances are you wouldn’t know what they’re
talking about. The internet and data are abstract concepts. Most people don’t want data; they
want the services you can use it for.

However, if you ask the same person if they want Facebook access, they’re more likely to say
yes. Besides communicating through phone calls and text messages, which you can already do
with any phone, connecting with the people around you through a social network is a basic
human behavior. It’s not a surprise that people intuitively want this even if they don’t
understand what data is.

The question is: can we align everyone’s incentives? Can more people get the services they
want and then discover new uses for the internet, so that phone makers can get better phones
into people’s hands and mobile operators can get more customers and more profits to further
invest in building out infrastructure?

Zero-rating data

We think this model exists. We’ve already seen results where attaching free data for Facebook
— what we’ve historically called zero-rating — increases both phone sales profits and data plan
profits.

From there, it shouldn’t be much of a stretch to also offer a broader set of basic internet
services as well once the industry achieves the kinds of cost efficiencies described above. Most
people in developing countries probably consume more data using Facebook than from all
other non-data-intensive services combined.

Credit and identity infrastructure

Over time, we may be able to help improve some of the social infrastructure that is still
nascent in many developing countries. The lack of credit infrastructure prevents operators
from offering post-paid models that could enable them to make longer term investments
in their customers. And while operators know some information about their customers, the
pre-paid model prevents them from knowing who their customers are. Giving people the ability
to link their Facebook or other accounts with operators could help solve these problems and
make it easier to provide better service.

Incentive alignment

• This is good for people because they’ll have an affordable way and a reason to connect to the internet and join the global knowledge economy.
• This is good for mobile operators because they’ll have more customers who want to buy more data, which will increase their profits and help them invest in building out the networks.
• This is good for phone manufacturers and technology providers because more people will
  want better devices, which will push the industry forward.
• This is good for internet services because the efficiencies we’ll all drive will make it easier and cheaper for the next 5 billion people to access their services.
• This is good for the world because everyone will benefit from the increased knowledge,
  experience and progress we make from having everyone connected to the internet.

Conclusion

I hope this rough plan can serve as a blueprint for some of what we’ll all need to do to connect
the next 5 billion people.

We are excited to hear your feedback and ideas. We know this plan will evolve, but we are
deeply committed to finding a path to connect everyone in the world.

I think that connecting the world will be one of the most important things we all do in our
lifetimes, and I’m thankful every day to have the opportunity to work with all of you to make
this a reality.