We were quite pleased with Econet’s announcement on Sunday that they had launched cheaper Facebook browsing via website specific bundles that subscribers can buy for $3 a month. The bundle price is definitely much lower than their regular mobile broadband tariffs and would be great if other providers can do something similar.
Facebook is good for social and all. But the important opportunity of the internet is access to education. Wouldn’t it be great if the mobile providers provided some special prices for access to knowledge sites like Wikipedia and to education sites like Khan Academy, Coursera and Udacity. The access could be the same special bundle model for websites with a lot of traffic like Wikipedia or just outright free for the strictly education sites which presumably wouldn’t cost them much in traffic, but would keep them a subscribers who will still visit other “paid” sites.
They could even spin this off as part of their CSR and the market would love them for it. Our famed high literacy rate (being able to read and write) is nothing without knowledge & new skill, and the internet makes it amazingly easier for people to access these.
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Sure we wanna learn but price of data ma1, ul need to stream HD videos, and its not an option with the current prices.. so, instead of FB CodeAcademy….
Took the words right out of my mouth. FB is a total waste of productive time for students and workforce who’s core field has nothing to do with FB. FB is a high bandwidth application so much that it can almost compete,in total,with at least one of those sites.
Wikipedia isos can be downloaded and easily mirrored locally as a local “cache”.
How about also not charging for locally originating content? Like what YoAfrica does or used to do?
Great contribution, how about subsidizing access to MOOCs (Massively Open Online Courses)
I completely agree, these sites could be cached locally to reduce the bandwith allocation, however, how do we choose which sites to cache?
In business you go with what the majority of people want if you want to succeed, you have an excellent idea there but to an average Zim kid from the townships Facebook is the way to go.