Facebook Strives to Bring Cheap Wi-Fi to Rural India

Facebook’s little-known ambition in India is to build a network of cheap Wi-Fi access points that would help residents in remote villages log on to the Internet almost as easily as people do in the West.

The dishes relay signals to and from a base station in the valley below, other mountain towers and, ultimately, Internet access points in about 40 villages. The wireless Internet service, called Express Wi-Fi, is not free. For 10 rupees, or about 15 cents, customers can buy one day’s access to 100 megabytes of data; $3 will buy 20 gigabytes of data, which can be used over the course of a month. Those prices are roughly one-third the cost of similar prepaid data plans from Airtel, the most reliable cellular operator in the mountains.