Newsletter
Although many people don’t think of this, we take the internet for granted. With smartphones giving us quick access to the information that we either need or want to view, we forget that this technology has literally been with us since the early 2000’s. A lot of us may get upset when we lose internet connection or Google Docs glitched out and didn’t save your paper due the next day. But the true reality of it all is that while we’re busy surfing the web and getting upset when a YouTube video clocks out, people across the world are for the first time using the internet.
A report from the UN says that 300 Million people stepped into the online world for the first time last year which made 2015 the year that the most people were using the internet. The numbers sounds exciting and may even lead you to think that we have finally overcome that digital divide, but think again. For the many people who fall in that large sum of new users, accessing the internet isn’t as easy as you think. People that live in countries like India, Indonesia, and the Philippines have a much more difficult time trying to gain access to sites due to poor service. In addition for many first time internet users their only source for retrieving internet is through a budget smartphone and paying to connect cost a lot of money. To add the frosting on the cake, loading websites on these budget phones isn’t nearly as quick as ours, taking minutes to load.
With all of these problems plaguing first time internet users, Google wants to try and help out and fix these issues. With Singapore being a hyper connected city and having some of the world’s fastest internet speeds, Google plans to construct an engineering team so they can get closer to the next billion internet users that will soon come online. Some of the steps that Google will take is joining with Singapore-based startup Pie.co so they can get their engineering team off the ground. Next they will begin hiring engineers based in Singapore for whoever is interested and as well will hold a 12-week engineering internship program. Their last initiative is to hire engineers from across the world who wish to come back home to Singapore or want to call this beautiful country their own.
Google has been on work for sometime now to organize the world’s internet by adding high speed Wi-Fi to Indian railway stations and also by making search work faster on lower data speeds. We’re only in the beginning stages of what is to come for the future of internet across the world.