California firm undercuts $100 laptop scheme
By John Lister
A Californian company has landed a deal to supply computers for 1.8 million schoolchildren in India. It’s touting the sale as proof there’s a viable commercial alternative to the much-publicized $100 laptop program for the developing world.
Instead of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) scheme, NComputing Inc, has a different strategy: one desktop per five children. Its deal with the southern Indian state of Andra Pradesh is for a virtualization system where multiple users work from a single computer.
The reduced hardware costs mean the system only costs around $70 per ‘seat’, which is the number of people who can simultaneously access the computers. As the deal is for 50,000 seats, NComputing could rake in $3.5 million, though it’s not saying whether the Indian government paid the full price. CNET’s Ina Fried pegs the payment at around $2 million.
At full capacity, the system can run seven seats from a single computer. However, the Indian schools will be running two computers in each classroom, each serving five seats. That’s a deliberate trade-off of added cost to avoid the disruption which would occur if a lone machine went down.
NComputing’s chief exec Stephen Dukker says commercial solutions such as this are much more suited to schools than the OLPC scheme. He told the Associated Press that using mainstream computers makes it easier for local technicians to maintain and upgrade systems.
OLPC’s founder Nicholas Negroponte said in response that the two organizations serve different needs. He argues that, while virtualization is the best low-cost option for school use, the $100 laptop scheme is aimed at every child having their own computer to use at home as well as at school.
Of course, as a spokesman for a technology group in India’s neighbour Bangladesh pointed out to Forbes.com, that may not be viable everywhere: “If we could afford to buy one computer per child, we wouldn’t be a poor country.”
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October 13th, 2008
I think you got the last quote wrong. In Forbes article it is attributed to Abdul-Muyeed Chowdhury, “the director of an organization working to build subsidized cyber cafes across Bangladesh”.
October 14th, 2008
Dima – thanks for picking up on this and letting us know.
(To other readers: the article has since been edited to clarify that Chowdhury’s group is in Bangladesh, not India.)