I don't think that this, or Google's balloon project, are supposed to be free. Cheap, sure -- they have competitors on the ground. But for something like this to stay aloft, they'll need to charge enough money to at least have a plausible chance of recovering their operating expenses at some point.
The author claims they would be free at a couple points in the article.
On re-reading, that's precisely one of his complaints: providing a free service deprives governments of tax revenue.
"Carriers, some of them foreign but some of them local,
have been in many of these markets for years, providing
for a fee services that companies such as Google and
Facebook now want to provide for free. And they are big
local employers (in Ghana, I was told Vodafone was the
largest private employer), as well as taxpayers.
[...] Essentially, these companies are trying to reap
the reward of encouraging more people to use their
services, such as WhatsApp, without doing the messy
work that carriers and handset makers such as Nokia and
Samsung do; that is, actually setting up businesses on
the ground, paying taxes that help fund development and
social services, employing and training that nation’s
citizens, not to mention building real relationships."
* How exactly do you avoid paying taxes on something that's free?