MashBlur

It's hard to remember, but things looked good for Facebook's ambitions in India last fall.

"India has 600,000 villages, and most people get scared when they hear this number. My vision is to connect them all with optical fiber cable in the next five years," Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said during a town hall with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the company's headquarters in Menlo Park, California, in September 2015.

Zuckerberg had begun the session by reciting India's importance in the history of Facebook. He said he was once unsure about his company's future, and his mentor, Steve Jobs, suggested he visit a temple in India, where he would find his answers, which Zuckerberg did. The revelation instantly struck a chord, not only with the prime minister, but also with many Indians watching the session online.

Cut to three months later and Facebook has somehow managed to become an enemy of the very same people Zuckerberg was trying to connect with. Much ink has been spilled on Facebook's Free Basics program and how it violates the tenets of net neutrality.Mashable has extensively covered the tussle between Facebook and India's telecom regulator, which finally culminated yesterday with India banning Free Basics along with other zero rated services.

It's fascinating how Facebook could stumble so badly when it came to one of its boldest bets in its mission to connect the unconnected population in the world.

Let's begin with some numbers. Industry estimates suggestIndia had 375 million Internet users at the end of October 2015, a number that was supposed to touch 402 million. Facebook has over 130 million users from India that log in at least once every month, which translates to roughly one in three connected Indians who access Facebook. If you throw in the more than 100 million monthly active users WhatsApp has in India, the number of users of Facebook-owned services is even higher — assuming there are many people who use WhatsApp but don't have a Facebook account.

With Free Basics, Facebook said it wanted to bring more unconnected users online. At a town hall held at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi last December, Zuckerberg said Free Basics had already brought 15 million users online, of which a million came from India. And that's not all — he claimed half of people who came to Free Basics opted to pay to access the whole Internet.

What was missing from the announcement was the number of people who accessed Free Basics that were not exactly first-time Internet users. A Buzzfeed investigation revealedthat in most markets where Facebook had launched Free Basics with carrier partners, the majority of users already had a data plan and used Free Basics to access Facebook for free or used it when they ran out of data credit.

In other words, Facebook's carrier partners were using Free Basics to retain customers by helping them access Facebook for free, while subscribers on other networks had to pay for it. No wonder carriers were willing to foot the cost of serving Free Basics.

"The biggest reason why four billion people don’t access the Internet — bigger than issues of access or cost — is they don’t know why it might be valuable," Zuckerberg hadproclaimed in his IIT Delhi town hall. That proclamation might have some truth to it, but in India's case access and cost might be bigger issues. Which takes us back to where I started — Prime Minister Modi's ambition to connect 600,000 Indian villages with optical fiber cable.

According to the latest report available with the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (the same body that banned Free Basics), India had a total of 131.49 million "broadband" connections at the end of Nov. 2015. (TRAI classifies any connection above 512kbps as broadband — this includes wired connections, wireless as well as fixed wireless connections like Wi-Fi, WiMax and VSAT.)

That's 131.49 million connections for a population of over 1.25 billion — only about 10%

of the country. What India needs is more connectivity.

Technologist Anil Dash told Zuckerberg why Free Basics is probably the wrong approach for Facebook in India: "Internet.org may be a fundamentally wrong structure for delivering these kinds of services because it doesn't empower people to create solutions for themselves that are culturally and contextually appropriate. What about pausing the Internet Basics effort and spending some time on a real effort to listen to Indian voices about what would help them have connectivity on their own terms, in a way they find acceptable?" he commented on Zuckerberg's Facebook post on being disappointed with India's decision.

The point being that rather than giving unlimited access to a restricted Internet, Facebook could have served India better by giving limited, free access to the entire Internet. Surprisingly, Facebook is working on a project in India, called Express Wi-Fi, where it is encouraging local entrepreneurs to purchase inexpensive hardware to setup a public Wi-Fi network and provide affordable Internet service. Guess how many people know about this project? Certainly not the millions of Indians who came to know about Free Basics via Facebook's multi-million dollar advertising blitzkrieg.

India's telecom minister, Ravi Shankar Prasad, has set a target of adding another 100 million Internet users in the country over the next seven months. To achieve this figure, the state-run carrier BSNL will be setting up 2,500 public Wi-Fi hotspots across the country by Mar. 2017. Facebook could have played a big role in this mission, but it lost its way somewhere.

After addressing the town hall session at Facebook's headquarters, Prime Minister Modi visited the Googleplex in Mountain View, California, where India-born Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced a partnership with Indian Railways to install 400 Wi-Fi hotspotsat the busiest railway stations — 100 of which would go online in 2016.

"Even with just the first 100 stations online, this project will make Wi-Fi available for the more than 10 million people who pass through every day.

"It will also be fast — many times faster than what most people in India have access to today, allowing travelers to stream a high-definition video while they’re waiting, research their destination, or download some videos, a book or a new game for the journey ahead. Best of all, the service will be free to start, with the long-term goal of making it self-sustainable to allow forexpansion to more stations and other places, with RailTel and more partners, in the future," he added.

Google's Wi-Fi project, which has largely been welcomed, shows why Free Basics was flawed from the start: While Facebook was peddling a limited Internet where users could access its services along with others that Facebook chose, Google was giving away the entire Internet, and at speeds faster than then norm.

It's still an open question whether Google's project will succeed in the long term, but at least it's an attempt to address the key issue of connectivity, and with a level of service that most of the world enjoys. In contrast, Facebook's Free Basics was treating India as the third world. Indians have had quite enough of that, thank you.