At the end of 2015 Chinese President Xi Jinping announced a cooperative China – Africa plan descriptively titled “Access to Satellite TV for 10,000 African Villages.”

The plan proposes to offer 10,000 villages across 25 countries a package of free services to enable satellite TV. Each village will receive two projector TVs, a 32 inch digital TV, and 20 additional satellite dish systems allowing access. The projectors and digital TV are to be set up in public spaces in the village. To address power shortages, each will also have solar panels and batteries allowing six hours of viewing with no power.

While this initiative doesn’t address internet or broadband issues, it is another example of communications and media extending into resource-poor environments.

The plan is progressing, with completion scheduled for 2019. The implementing firm is StarTimes, a Chinese multimedia company with extensive experience in Africa.

What happens when the country with the world’s largest population of people without internet access offers free phones and almost free unlimited data?

We’re finding out in India.

In 2016 Reliance Industries, the petrochemical consortium and India’s largest publicly traded company, launched Jio, a telecommunications initiative. Jio is the brainchild of Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest man, who seeks to provide internet access to everyone in India at affordable prices.

Reliance has spent the last few years constructing 200,000 new cell towers and laying 150,000 miles of fiber optic cable to provide fast 4G connectivity across the country, spending $35 billion.

Jio launched its service at the end of 2016, offering free calling, free texting, and six months of free data, after which data charges were about 1/4 industry average. Usage skyrocketed, both in terms of subscribers, now over 200 million, and data usage, now the highest in the world for any company.

In 2017 Jio introduced the “JioPhone”, a hybrid feature phone / smart phone that takes advantage of 4G data speeds. Among other features the phone comes preloaded with 500 streaming TV channels and music in 17 languages. The phone is essentially free: it requires a $23 deposit which is returned with the return of the phone.

Josh Woodward of Google, who has led teams building new web services in India, says that thanks to Jio and the JioPhone, “hundreds of millions of users are now going to come online faster than all the models projected.”

Ambani relates a story that a few years ago he was at home (“home” — 27 stories of rooms complete with helipad) when his daughter came home for break from Yale. “Dad, the internet in our house sucks” she complained. That apparently set in motion the largest, fastest cellular expansion in history.

Ambani’s ambitions apparently haven’t slowed. In July he claimed his network was still only at 20% capacity and that “We are determined to connect everyone and everything, everywhere.”