--- title: 5 Billion People Off-line? Here's How to Fix It | TIME description: You might not know it but 5 billion us have no internet access. Web evengelist Kosta Grammatis has a novel idea to wire the world for free. canonical: https://time.com/video/hx6Xuusq/ og:title: 5 Billion People Off-line? Here's How to Fix It og:description: You might not know it but 5 billion us have no internet access. Web evengelist Kosta Grammatis has a novel idea to wire the world for free. og:url: https://time.com/video/hx6Xuusq/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/hx6Xuusq/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: 5 Billion People Off-line? Here's How to Fix It twitter:description: You might not know it but 5 billion us have no internet access. Web evengelist Kosta Grammatis has a novel idea to wire the world for free. twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/hx6Xuusq/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # 5 Billion People Off-line? 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: 5 Billion People Off-line? Here's How to Fix It [Watch (HLS stream): 5 Billion People Off-line? Here's How to Fix It](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/hx6Xuusq.m3u8) (3:52)  _Published 2014-05-30. You might not know it but 5 billion us have no internet access. Web evengelist Kosta Grammatis has a novel idea to wire the world for free._ --- Jul 27, 2023 4:43 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [1.3 Billion People Live in Poverty, a New U.N. Report Says](/video/zyjpqvcN/) ### 1.3 Billion People Live in Poverty, a New U.N. Report Says [Will a Billion-Dollar Idea Get You Rich?](/video/H5ac7wYU/) ### Will a Billion-Dollar Idea Get You Rich? [Why $16.5 Billion In Revenue Is Still Disappointing For Google](/video/JS6c63Wk/) ### Why $16.5 Billion In Revenue Is Still Disappointing For Google --- ## Transcript You might now know it, but for every one of us that is online, two aren't. Bill Gates said that the internet isn't that important. We should be working on some of the causes that he's working on, malaria. Totally noble causes, but the thing that I love about the internet and why it's so important to me is how it brings everyone together, and so although internet access may not be solving world hunger, it is creating a new way for all of us to work together as a humanity. And that's why I think everyone should be connected. [ MUSIC ]. My name is Kosta Grammatis and I am the founder of A Human Right. A Human Right is a non- profit organization charged with ensuring everybody has access to the internet. After college, I was, puttering around on a whole bunch of projects and, and I applied for this think- tank innovation camp out in Berlin, and I was accepted. So I met all these crazy people working on all sorts of incredible projects to help others. It was while I was at this camp, I started to ask questions about, what do you mean we still have to build schools? I mean, I had this experience where I didn't necessarily need to go to school, I was learning things that my school couldn't even teach me. Cuz the internet had, had answered a lot of the questions for me and helped guide me towards the knowledge that I needed. And then it donned on me, well maybe the world doesn't have internet access. And I Googled around for it and, in fact, it's, it's true. Five billion people don't have access to the internet. So at this think tank, about five or six of us got together, and we started A Human Right. [ MUSIC ] We started this project by the satellite. There was a satellite of, from a bankrupt company. And if you don't understand how satellites work, they, they hover in space and, and they're able to bring internet access to entire continents. Except they're really expensive, so we started a crowd funding campaign. This is kind of before kickstarter was really a big thing at that point. Ultimately, we fell a little bit short of the billions of dollars required. We started several other projects to like Move This Cable where we were trying to route a trans- Atlantic table to connect one of the most remote islands. And it's going to miss the island by just a couple hundred kilometers. Why don't you just move it down just a little bit, and you can give 5000 people internet that don't really have it? And they did it. It was cool. We really want to bring the vision of everyone connected to life. So, what if we built a company that stood for everything that we value like universal connectivity? And empowering people through online connectivity. And that's what we've been working on for the last year is, is building this public benefit company called Oluvus that inspires to ensure everybody has free access to the internet, so we have plans that are built around free internet access. And when you run out, you can buy more. It's always affordable. And then we keep track of how much bandwidth we've sold across the entire network. And once we hit a certain amount of bandwidth sold, we launch a connectivity project somewhere in the world to get more people online. We've reached out to the world's largest refugee camp in Dadaab, Kenya. In Dadaab there's half a million people there who, if given a little bit of information, a little bit of access to knowledge, can solve their own problems. Any person has the power within them to make the change that they want to see in the world. I don't have a huge ego invested in you know, me being the person who brings internet to the world. In fact, I'm so excited that there are so many other companies and individuals and people who are working on this idea to bring internet to as many places as possible because of the potential and power of internet access. [ MUSIC ] ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"5 Billion People Off-line? Here's How to Fix It","description":"You might not know it but 5 billion us have no internet access. Web evengelist Kosta Grammatis has a novel idea to wire the world for free.","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/hx6Xuusq/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2014-05-30T20:44:42.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/hx6Xuusq.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/video/hx6Xuusq/","duration":"PT3M52S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/video/hx6Xuusq/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}} ```