I find all these comments fascinating. Personally, I think its no longer debatable that connectivity is a very powerful tool to empower people in ways that can help them climb out of poverty. Can you imagine what it would be like not to be able to make a phone call or send an email--instead, have to go physically to talk to everyone with whom you need to interact? That, unfortunately, is still the case for about half the world's people, either for reasons of access or cost. We are now piloting a model in rural Vietnam that could dramatically lower the costs of phone and internet service, both for users and for telecommunications. In fact, this model can make local calls entirely free for users, and lower capex by a factor of 5 and operational costs by half, compared to a typical mobile network. Because both customers and telcos win under this model, we think it has a chance of being adopted and used to build out in rural areas. And then the incredible entrepreneurial innovation that low-income phone users display in finding new ways to use this tool--as illustrated in the NYT article--can be unleashed.