Idea's 'Internet for All': A better alternative to free basics

Idea Cellular, India's third largest mobile operator has launched an "Internet For All" program that gives away one month of free access to non-Internet users.

Under the new program, Idea prepaid subscribers and retailers can log on to the carrier's website to gift non-Internet users 100MB of free data for a month. The person who sends the gift will also get a credit of 100MB of data from Idea. The carrier will periodically send information on how non-Internet users can use the free data.

“Internet adoption today is being shaped predominantly through the use of mobile telephony. However, currently only 25% of India’s population are connected to the internet," Sashi Shankar, Chief Marketing Officer at Idea said. "Accelerating mobile internet adoption is huge task and requires larger participation. Our 'Internet for All' initiative will encourage the uninitiated to learn more about the internet as a tool for education, banking, shopping, and entertainment, while gaining access to a world of opportunity that the internet opens for us all.”

“We believe that internet adoption can be accelerated at the grass-root level if existing internet users introduce their unconnected friends and family to adopt the service, thereby transforming their lives," he added.

With a projected 402 million Internet users, India has the world's second-largest online user base. Yet, this pales in relation to the fact that only a third of the country's 1.2 billion people have Internet access. Idea, which currently has 175 million subscribers, says that its pan-India operations cover 880 million people.

With this, Idea's Internet access program does what Facebook's Free Basics failed to do: give limited but free access to the entire Internet rather than unlimited access to a restricted number of websites and services chosen by and including Facebook.

While Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg maintained that it was "not sustainable to offer the whole Internet for free", Idea is proposing a different model of introducing people to the Internet and then letting them decide if they would like to continue to stay connected.