Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s Founder and Internet.org’s initiator, is currently in Indonesia. He visits the country to promote his campaign of reaching two third of world population who have yet been connected to the internet. While teaming up with Ericsson as the global partner and XL Axiata as the local partner, Internet.org, via Facebook, initiates the enhancement of app coverage performance up to 70% in Indonesia.
“All Internet.org intends to do is to make sure that each and every single person all over the world getting an access to the very basic rights of internet. This is based on the fact that only one third of world’s population have got connected, while two third of them haven’t. There are indeed plenty of obstacles that contribute to this. A location may have an infrastructure issue, while the others may have problem with their economics condition. The lack of localized content could also serve as another obstacle. This time, we focus on economics,” Zuckerberg stated.
“If every single Indonesian people and company gets connected to internet, then the society may have better access to the goods and services, companies may serve customers extremely well, businesses can be more efficient, and the country’s prosperity will develop in the right track,” he further added.
According to Zuckerberg, there would be tons of Indonesian culture and innovation getting advantages should they are connected to the internet, since they would have better chances of sharing themselves to the world.
Unlike his visit to India, in which he presented the Innovation Challenge contest with $250,000 prize, he emphasized on giving tutorial to the developers, especially local ones, about developing a mobile app which is optimized for cellular network during his time in Indonesia. This is in line with Internet.org’s belief, that the enhancement of network performance and customers’ experience of having better cellular network would be the very key to the program’s glory in Indonesia.
Currently, 75% of Indonesian cellular users are in 2G GSM/EDGE network. XL itself stated that the traffic data went up to 142 percent during 2013, thanks to the fact that half of its customers had got connected to the internet. In total, XL has 62,9 million customers.
As for the optimization, which is done by a number of prominent companies, e.g Facebook, Ericsson, and XL, it has successfully increased the number of completed connection reached in three seconds up to 70%, time to content by 70%, and upload time by 50%.
“This is for the first time globally that a collaboration is made up by a group of operator, provider, network technology, and app provider. XL is definitely proud to be chosen as Facebook’s partner in Indonesia. We are very sure that the app coverage is a fundamental thing to cover, and it is apparent in the using of Facebook app on network-wide statistics, which has been an innovative yet efficient way of detecting as well as giving the opportunity to optimize the app and telecommunication network,” Hasnul Suhaimi, XL’s CEO, stated.
