The satellites were first announced last year in October. Facebook has partnered a European satellite operator called Eutelsat and all this is part of Facebook’s internet.org project.
The objective, Zuckerberg said yesterday, is to reduce the number of people who don’t have access to the internet. He pointed out 3 reasons preventing about 4 billion people globally from using the internet: Availability, Affordability and Awareness. He said availability prevents about a billion people. No doubt mostly in developing countries. Affordability, he said, affects another billion people. Again, this has to be mostly in developing countries.
The Awareness factor was a bit of a surprise for us. According to Zuckerberg, there are about 2 billion people out there who live in a place where there’s good internet coverage, can afford to pay for data, but just don’t see the point of using the internet! In Zimbabwe, it’s all 3 factors combined but Availability and Affordability likely account for over 80% of the cases.