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Comment by witty_username | Hacker News Reader

Infact it only costs 0.01$/GB (probably less with peering) to offer access to the entire internet. Suppose a 50 MB daily data cap is provided to users and there are 50 million users, that's 50000$/day i.e. 18.25$ million/year, certainly not impossible for Facebook (and probably data costs can be cut down 50% with better peering). And I would not mind the government funding a portion of this.

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Facebook rather spend that money on Billboards, advertising "Free Basics". Facebook should come clear on what it is gaining from "Free Basics" instead of acting as an angelic, non-profit. Or is all the money they're spending to advertise 'free basics' in India for a non-profit motive?? Should mention the profit motives in their ads.

Indians were taken aback by the amount of money Facebook chose to spend to advertise Free Basics. Premium Billboards, 2 page advertisements on major publications, other ads...They must have a plan to make profit out of all this spending. They should come clean on it in their ads.

seriously, todays front page of a leading Kolkata newspaper had a large two page advertisements of free basics, citing "What Net neutrality activists wont tell you" : http://imgur.com/a/hb3nt.

Assuming they are honest, I don't get their argument. If most people are paying for the internet, they why do they need Free Basics in the first place? An internet connection costs a fraction of the hardware cost, or is embedded in the hardware subscription.

So you can either afford hardware and internet, or you can't afford internet in which case you also can't afford the hardware, so the free internet is useless.

Assuming their motives are truly altruistic, making internet free doesn't make any sense!

you have a good point.

India desperately needs faster internet rather than free internet. If we assume even the cheapest hardware, say a laptop costing less than 300$, the internet costs in a range of 7$ to 45$ a month (inr to usd conversion estimates, might vary). The faster connection u want, the more u have to pay. Sadly, the avg internet speed of our country is at the very bottom of global rankings. If they really are altruistic, they should provide faster internet in cheaper deals.

1c/GB is a tenth of the price of datacenter bandwidth, a hundredth of residential DSL or cable access bandwidth and a thousandth the price of mobile bandwidth.

You're off by three orders of magnitude.

I forgot to clarify I meant DC<->Internet costs. This is the incremental cost of allowing full internet access.

http://www.michaelgeist.ca/2011/04/cost-to-send-a-gb/

The purpose of the limitation isn't to save peering costs, it's to ensure users click on Facebook's ads and compensate them for the costs of providing cellular access.

> 0.01$/GB

How? What I get here is INR 275/GB which is $6/GB (for 3G), and approx. INR 100/GB for Edge.

witty_username may have been exaggerating, but it's worth pointing out that this is substantially cheaper than prepaid internet access is available in the US. I pay $10/GB/week, which works out to something like $30/GB as I'm not trying to finish the GB/week allotment. This may be somewhat unusual in the US, and I'm assuming you prepay for a set amount of data, rather than data/time.

Anyway, I came to posit a different question. How much would it cost if it were a nonprofit that provides the internet access? What kind of margins are made on top of the prepaid data plans we're using?

Sorry, I mean their DC<->internet price. Most of the bandwidth costs are in the last mile connectivity. In any case they are paying for mobile towers; I am just saying that the incremental cost of providing full internet access is not very large. But you are right my figures are wrong.

If you compare Airtel (Private) vs BSNL[1] (government) one, the pricing is almost same.

In poorer regions Indian government tries to subsidise it as well, and ends up with loses every year (barring 2015), so I guess we can approximate it to a non-profit org?

1. http://bsnl.in/opencms/bsnl/BSNL/services/mobile/3g_prepaid_...

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