From: Mustafa Akgul (akgul@Bilkent.EDU.TR)
Date: Wed 17 Aug 2005 - 19:53:47 EEST
Original URL:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/08/15/100_dollar_laptop/
Chinese eye $100 wireless laptop
By Wireless Watch (peter at rethinkresearch.biz)
Published Monday 15th August 2005 10:11 GMT
Broadband wireless has traditionally flourished in developing
economies, as a relatively low cost way to bring broadband access
to countries with limited infrastructure. But this does not mean
that it is a technology for spreading access to poor users. In
general, operators in new economies target enterprises,
expatriates and other high income oases, leaving rural and low
income groups pretty much untouched.
Ming Dong, a wireless analyst with Analysis in Beijing, made the
point clearly. "Unlike in other nations where both the urban,
suburban, and rural areas are fully developed, China's rural
regions are still very underdeveloped, and inhabitants can't
afford broadband access,? he commented, seeing the greatest
potential for expanded access centering on communal hotspots.
Some efforts have been made by aid agencies, governments and
community groups to extend access to underserved areas, often
using a communal CPE (customer premises equipment), perhaps
housed in a village hall. But serious attempts to bridge the
digital divide remain largely a phenomenon of the developed
nations, seeking to bring their poorer communities into the
mainstream economy. Truly universal access depends on one factor
more than any other ? availability of ultra-low cost CPE.
Currently, Wi-Fi is mainly available in laptops, smartphones and
as part of a broadband home gateway, all devices that are priced
at several hundred dollars or more. WiMAX, it is widely accepted,
will only become a consumer market technology when it achieves
similar or lower CPE costs. True, Wi-Fi cards are now trivial in
cost, and WiMAX cards will fall below $50 by 2008, but they still
have to be housed in a device that is expensive to the end user.
Research institutions and vendors are increasingly turning their
thoughts to a more radical approach to CPE, one that could
support mass market access in poor populations and so boost
volumes enormously, and support a new range of business models
for operators, whether commercial or publicly owned. Much of this
work has, predictably, been centered in the country that has made
the most proactive moves towards a strategy to broadband enable
more of its vast low income population, India.
The country?s influential Center for Development of Telematics
(C-Dot) is working with Alcatel, Wavesat, Intel and others on
broadband wireless platforms with ultra-low cost user devices.
One of the most important projects is a collaboration with the
Canadian creators of the Milton (Microwave Light Organized
Network) technology, to build a very low cost last mile option
for rural parts of India. Milton was conceived as a link between
the fiber backbone ? which is widespread but underused in India ?
and the home and the plan is to move the proprietary elements of
the design to standard 802.11a and 802.16-2004 standards in the
near future using WaveSat silicon.
The Hundred Dollar Laptop
AMD, among others, has been working on very cheap, low footprint
platforms for mass market wireless devices, but the latest
concept that could shift the communications goal posts comes from
Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology?s Media Lab, who has outlined the blueprint for the
so-called Hundred Dollar Laptop (HDL), a first step towards even
lower cost devices in future.
The HDL that Negroponte posits would bypass three expensive
components of conventional laptops - Microsoft Windows, a
traditional flat panel screen, and a hard drive. Instead it will
be loaded with Linux and other open source software; its display
will use either a rear projection screen or a type of electronic
ink invented at the MIT Media Lab; and it will store one gigabyte
of files in flash memory.
Once turned on, HDLs will automatically connect to one another
using a mesh network initially developed at MIT and the Media Lab
? a spontaneous, carrierless method of broadband access that is
also being worked on by Microsoft and Intel, both eager to see
their core technologies being pushed out to the world?s entire
population.
In Negroponte?s mesh, each HDL will act as the household email,
telephone (using Skype or other free software) and internet
access device. For communities without electricity, HDLs may be
powered by either a crank or ?parasitic power? (typing). He
claims that he has been talking to Chinese manufacturers that
could build the HDL for under $100 providing there were committed
orders of at least six million in the first year. Chinese
authorities themselves have said they would be interested in
buying two million machines and Brazil 1m, said Negroponte.
Negroponte writes: "Education: one laptop per child. Whatever big
problem you can imagine, from world peace to the environment to
hunger to poverty, the solution always includes education. We
need to depend more on peer-to-peer and self-driven learning. The
laptop is one important means of doing that."
This idealistic view verges on the naïve in a world where many
of the communities to which Negroponte refers are close to
starvation, but the concept could still be workable for people in
the next economic tier, provided there was sufficient government
or international funding ? essential, primarily, to bear the
costs of internet access and backhaul.
Low cost handsets
Less pure motives may also push technology and its benefits out
to currently deprived sectors of the population. The development
of very cheap cellular handsets is one example of a largely
vendor-driven phenomenon, with most of the cellphone majors now
on track to deliver sub-$50 devices in the next 1-2 years.
Putting its considerable weight behind the trend is Texas
Instruments, which this week chose India as the location to
announce the availability of its single-chip technology for
cellphone makers in emerging markets.
The platform combines functions such as memory, logic, power
management, radio and network processes on a single chip to
reduce size and power requirements and drive down costs of entry
level GSM and GPRS phones. The chip was made available to Nokia
at the beginning of the year and is now available to
manufacturers in India and other emerging markets, claiming to
reduce the bill of materials by 30 per cent, opening up the
potential for a sub-$30 handset in the near future. Qualcomm is
working on a similar low cost platform for CDMA.
Copyright © 2005, Wireless Watch
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