&gt; Cheap enough for the 60% of rural Indians who live on less than 35 Rs&#x2F;day [1]?<p>Perhaps not; but I was including only people who can afford the phone.<p>&gt; The vast majority of mobile phones in India are feature phones which are considerably cheaper than smartphones<p>They&#x27;re still ~Rs 1k (you can get cheaper ones, but I don&#x27;t think even proxied sites will work well on these). Monthly data plans are less than a tenth of this.<p>IIRC Free Basics&#x27; Facebook still needed a good phone (higher end feature phone or a smartphone), but I can&#x27;t verify that right now.<p>And that really brings us back to the question; how is this bringing people to the Internet? Even if Facebook worked well on a Rs 400 phone, only the Free Basics sites would work well there. This just underlines that Facebook is trying to give people Free Facebook, nothing more. People who cannot afford these phones would not become &quot;Digital Indians&quot; by using Free Basics, they would use Facebook and only Facebook.