Cheap enough for the 60% of rural Indians who live on less than 35 Rs/day [1]?
> The cost of a smartphone that can handle modern websites (especially Facebook, which breaks on old/slow phones and browsers) is more than the cost of a few year's worth of data.
The vast majority of mobile phones in India are feature phones which are considerably cheaper than smartphones [2]. To be included in Free Basics, sites have to work reasonably on feature phones. Free Basics sites are accessed through a proxy which modifies requests so that the sites can tell that they are being viewed by a Free Basics user, and so the site can present a version that works without requiring "modern" features like JavaScript, SVG images and WOFF font types, iframes, video and large images, or Flash and Java applets.
> Cheap enough for the 60% of rural Indians who live on less than 35 Rs/day [1]?
Perhaps not; but I was including only people who can afford the phone.
> The vast majority of mobile phones in India are feature phones which are considerably cheaper than smartphones
They're still ~Rs 1k (you can get cheaper ones, but I don't think even proxied sites will work well on these). Monthly data plans are less than a tenth of this.
IIRC Free Basics' Facebook still needed a good phone (higher end feature phone or a smartphone), but I can't verify that right now.
And that really brings us back to the question; how is this bringing people to the Internet? Even if Facebook worked well on a Rs 400 phone, only the Free Basics sites would work well there. This just underlines that Facebook is trying to give people Free Facebook, nothing more. People who cannot afford these phones would not become "Digital Indians" by using Free Basics, they would use Facebook and only Facebook.
Cheap enough for the 60% of rural Indians who live on less than 35 Rs/day [1]?
> The cost of a smartphone that can handle modern websites (especially Facebook, which breaks on old/slow phones and browsers) is more than the cost of a few year's worth of data.
The vast majority of mobile phones in India are feature phones which are considerably cheaper than smartphones [2]. To be included in Free Basics, sites have to work reasonably on feature phones. Free Basics sites are accessed through a proxy which modifies requests so that the sites can tell that they are being viewed by a Free Basics user, and so the site can present a version that works without requiring "modern" features like JavaScript, SVG images and WOFF font types, iframes, video and large images, or Flash and Java applets.
[1] http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2012-05-04/news...
[2] http://www.igadgetsworld.com/india-smartphone-and-feature-ph...