If Facebook’s internet.org effort really wants to shake things up it should bypass the carriers

[Commentary] Facebook’s newly launched internet.org coalition to deliver mobile internet to everyone is more than its attempt to connect to its next billion users. It wants to reduce the cost of mobile data for the 5 billion people who are not online by making mobile data cheaper to deliver and apps more efficient. Facebook’s plan is probably to work with the carriers as much as it can, but there are plenty of challenges to that approach.

If we start with the larger problem of lowering the cost of mobile data for the carriers at an infrastructure level (rather than just shifting those costs), there are several elements to deal with: from the right equipment to the laws of physics. A mobile network has highly specialized gear in data centers and out at tower sites that communicates data over licensed airwaves. I’ve long argued that to lower their costs, the operators need to take a page from the webscale players’ book and build out cheaper gear that’s open. There’s another huge cost for carriers — that of the airwaves they use to send data. And finally we get to the physics. Facebook can talk about building more efficient mobile networks as much as it wants, but natural laws are far less mutable than manmade laws and there’s a big one governing data rates over the airwaves. Shannon’s Law describes the maximum amount of usable data that can be transmitted over any communication channel, whether wireless, wireline or even plain speech. Even as we move into the more sophisticated stages of LTE-Advanced we’re going to max out the amount of data we can squeeze into the airwaves at about 30 bits per hertz per second. There’s a capacity limit in the mobile airwaves, and carriers are using strategies like Wi-Fi offload and spectrum re-purposing to get around that limit. But the basic thing to note is that while computing is governed by Moore’s Law, which follows an exponential curve, Shannon’s Law describes a far more incremental improvement in capacity. That’s one reason why the cost of storage falls so rapidly, while the cost of cellular data is relatively constant.