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Journalism of Courage
Facebook has tied up with Anil Ambani’s Reliance Communications (RCom) to provide basic internet services on mobile phones for free, making India the first country in Asia to get Facebook’s Internet.org service.
The companies will first offer the app in seven of India’s 22 regions, or zones and it will then go nationwide in the next 90 days, Gurdeep Singh, chief executive of RCom’s consumer business told reporters.
The service is run by Internet.org, the non-profit organisation whose backers also include Ericsson , Nokia, Samsung, Qualcomm and Opera Software, which has the declared aim of making basic Internet services available to the two-thirds of the world’s population who are not yet connected.
It will be available to all of RCom’s 106.3 million subscribers who have handsets capable of handling internet traffic. Singh declined to comment on who will bear the cost of carrying the data traffic for free.
