Facebook no longer offers free internet

According toLight Reading, Meta confirmed that it has shut down its Connectivity division as part of a restructuring effort. The link to the project is still active, with the latest news being posted in August. The source said that the Connectivity assets have been distributed across Meta's two core Product and Infrastructure teams.

Meta Connectivity (formerly Facebook Connectivity) is an initiative launched by Facebook in 2013, with the goal of bringing the Internet to more people, thereby increasing the number of users of the company's social network.

One of Connectivity’s most notable activities is providing free Internet to developing countries, in conjunction with telecommunications partners. Last October, Meta said the service had provided Internet to more than 300 million users. However, it has also faced controversy over mistakenly charging users for accessing Facebook.

Meta Connectivity's Express Wi-Fi project provided public Wi-Fi in more than 30 countries earlier this year. Photo:Meta

Meta Connectivity also worked on the Aquila project, which aimed to deliver Internet to hard-to-reach areas using LTE-connected drones. The project was shut down in 2018 after several test flights failed. Another project, which aimed to provide Internet via satellites similar to Starlink, also ran into trouble when many key employees left for Amazon last April.

However, the main reason for the shutdown of Meta Connectivity is the company's restructuring to streamline its team and optimize costs. In the November layoffs, Mark Zuckerberg's company laid off 11,000 people, equivalent to 13% of its workforce. Dan Rabinovitsj, head of Meta Connectivity, remains with the company, but it is unclear what role he will be working in.

Over the past year, Meta has seen its business decline significantly as advertising revenue has declined, as the company has shifted to developing the metaverse and investing tens of billions of dollars in related technologies. In its latest newsletter on Connectivity’s website, Meta still expressed its ambition to popularize high-speed Internet, thereby attracting users to the metaverse it built. “Our hope is that the metaverse will reach over a billion users in the next decade. This future depends on reimagining the connectivity infrastructure,” the website reads.

According toLight Reading, although it has discontinued its Connectivity division, Meta is still involved in the Telecom Infra Project (TIP). This is a telecommunications infrastructure project initiated by Meta in 2016, in conjunction with Intel, Nokia, Deutsche Telekom and SK Telecom to promote Internet infrastructure worldwide.