14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook is revealing a few more details on how it plans to bring the Internet to the five billion people who don't have access today.
Several weeks ago, the company partnered with a few other players in the tech industry to come up with ways of expanding Internet access around the world, under the Internet.org umbrella. But details on how they were going to do this were light.
Together with Qualcomm and Ericsson, two of the companies involved with Internet.org, Facebook has now published a white paper describing some of the concrete ways of bringing down bandwidth usage, making data connections cheaper.
"The paper examines how Facebook approached building more efficient infrastructure technologies to connect over a billion users and how it’s working to build mobile apps that use less data and power," Facebook explains.
"Qualcomm and Ericsson’s contributions look to the future and what will be required to ensure that mobile networks and infrastructure will ready to support the next wave of mobile Internet usage," it adds.
In the first half of the paper [PDF], Facebook explains how it was able to scale like it did on the cheap, by using the most out of existing technology and reinventing some things when "the most" was not enough.
For example, the company built Hip Hop for PHP, a PHP to C/C++ converter which resulted in code that would run significantly faster on a given machine. It then came up with the Hip Hop Virtual Machine for PHP so that code would not have to be compiled to run fast.
The company also explains how it was able to design its own cheap servers that were good enough to do the job, were easily maintainable, and cost a fraction of what a server from one of the big companies building them would cost.
The paper also lists some ways of driving down data usage in apps, focusing on Facebook for Every Phone, but also on a few other technologies and methods. Facebook is a big fan of Google's WebP image format, which provides a considerable size improvement over PNGs or JPGs.