countries bandwidth and internet access [LWN.net]

countries bandwidth and internet access

Posted Jan 9, 2009 6:05 UTC (Fri) by Alterego (guest, #55989)
In reply to: XO is a laptop for children 6-12 years old by dlang
Parent article: Changes at OLPC

Based on CIA factbook:
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/int_int_int_ban_mbp_per...

Niger
International internet bandwidth: 30 Mb/s
Price basket for internet: 104 $month
http://www.nationmaster.com/country/ng-niger/int-internet

USA:
International Internet Bandwith: 970 Gb/s
Price basket of internet: 14 $/month
http://www.nationmaster.com/country/us-united-states/int-...

So i maintain:
1/ olpc is misinformed of reality when it speaks of internet access for children with their wonderful technology

2/ the only realistic solution to share our wonderful things is to provide local proxy, for example a (not so big) bunch of DVD with distro mirrors (10 DVD's) and wikipedia (10 DVD's), and tldp.org and other goodies (less than 10 DVDs), or a 100$ some hundreds GB HD.

to post comments

countries bandwidth and internet access

Posted Jan 9, 2009 6:29 UTC (Fri) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link] (1 responses)

OLPC's concept of net access is mesh networking, more than connection to the global backbone. Kids can network to teacher's laptop. Teacher can get materals by sneakernet.

countries bandwidth and internet access

Posted Jan 9, 2009 11:06 UTC (Fri) by Alterego (guest, #55989) [Link]

True, mesh networking is a really good idea, maybe a short term low cost solution of using a wire/wifi would have been enought ?

I was refering to the OLPC propaganda:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMeX2D4AOjM
"connected so the child can access the internet" 42s-44s of the video.

This is unrealistic in Africa, which is nearly half of the developping countries.

The OLPC team of 60/32 people is probably more important than the team of Nepad working on ICT and education.
This is also one identified problem of development: foreign NGOs have more power than local governments (at least in Africa), and they do what they want, no matter if it is asked for, or at least adequate.

I can tell you: they don't care about high-tech for children, they just want normal (preferably low power) computers for universites and schools, they can tune and repair easily, like we do with ordinary exchangable components. And they need to part-time work as cyber-center, to cover the expenses (mainly teachers, power and bandwidth cost)

There are many very sad examples of great ideas leading to complete failure due to ignorance, eg contraception (translated as "barrier to children" which is opposite to culture whereas a local term "spacing sorgho plants" would have been perfectly understood and accepted http://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2009/01/08/l-aide-a...), agriculture (new food people don't eat, or which require very long cooking time so the energy budget explodes), in water management (destabilise the local economy balance and create international tension, or deep drill that fall apart after 2 years and force people to manually get water from 40m when before it was 10m) ... This only due to, let's say, the certitude of being Right, when one has only a very superficial knowledge of the situation.

Child education is very culture-dependant. So, we (highly tech developped people), can maybe provide technology expertise, or share university courses, but for child's education the content must be done by local people, or for sure it will be inadequate.

Let's say olpc had some great ideas, partly suitable, but went wrong, and need to travel in Africa to learn.

countries bandwidth and internet access

Posted Jan 9, 2009 18:44 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (5 responses)

the OLPC 'perfect deployment' is very similar to your #2

the laptops use the mech networking to talk to the school server, which is the proxy to whatever Internet connection there is, and also has a large store of content on it's local drive.

OLPC is deploying these systems out in the wild, they are working with people who are setting up point-to-point wifi connections over several miles to bring connectivity to the schools. they are _very_ aware of what the bandwidth limitations are.

countries bandwitdh and internet access

Posted Jan 9, 2009 20:20 UTC (Fri) by Alterego (guest, #55989) [Link] (4 responses)

Nice to learn this. I did not this on laptop.org. I'd be glad to have an url, ideally which explains the funding of the infrastructure too, and how OLPC fits a pre existing demand from the country.

On laptop.org, in press:
"# 2008-01-07
One Laptop per Child Giving Campaign Raises $35 Million in 2007"

for 100 000 xo, for rwanda, cambodia ...

I doubt that Rwanda wanted laptop for childs, but of course they accepted them when they came. It is just misused resources that fit no need, but the sponsors are satisfied, so why complain ?

35 million$ is 5% of rwanda budget !

Reread my rant against powerful foreign NGO that do unwanted things. I just hope they will take the olpc and put them where there will be more useful.

countries bandwitdh and internet access

Posted Jan 9, 2009 20:58 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (3 responses)

are you saying that all $35M came from Rwanda? and only got them 100,000 laptops?

they probably spent ~$200,000 or so on the 100,000 laptops for Rwanda (probably a bit more to account for infrastructure pieces)

the $35M is probably the entire budget for OLPC for the year (and in 2007 they were not distributing many laptops, they only hit mass production in october 2007)

where is your evidence that the laptops that were sent there have been misappropriated? if they didn't want them they wouldn't have spent the effort to work with the OLPC organization to get them, train teachers, and distribute them.

OLPC doesn't just load a crate with laptops, put them on the boat/plane and then declare success. a deployment team works on-site, with the teachers and watches that the laptops are being distributed to the kids. they also continue to watch after that, if for no other reason that they are looking for success stories to post, but also to help worth through problems.

your attitude that OLPC must be evil is doing a huge disservice to the people with the OLPC project that are on the ground in the countries working to make things succeed.

countries bandwitdh and internet access

Posted Jan 10, 2009 1:50 UTC (Sat) by Alterego (guest, #55989) [Link] (2 responses)

my post was unclear sorry.
I meant that OLPC fund rising for 2007 is equivalent to 5% of the budget of Rwanda !
And if we count $200 x 500 000 unit = $1 billion, the whole olpc budget is greater than Rwanda budget. (did you read what i wrote about powerful but ignorant foreigners NGOs ?)

Of course any as-poor-as rwanda country will accept some thousands of brand new laptop. The sad side of the story is that there, universities lacks computers, and all all these laptop would have been much more usefull to the country at the university than in the hand of 6-12 yo child !

And it seems obvious to me that knwoledge transmission must begin at university, then naturally flows downward in schools, as _their_ university also produce _their_ teachers.

Your attitude that OLPC must be *perfect* is doing a huge disservice...

Do you know people on the ground in some developing countries... ? I do, i m just telling what they explained to me, frankly, without any hope that i would come with $millions.

countries bandwitdh and internet access

Posted Jan 10, 2009 2:19 UTC (Sat) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

if you think that I consider the OLPC project perfect then you have missed my very heated criticism about them. I defiantly do not consider them perfect or anything close to it.

however, I do think that they are doing good things, and doing it in ways that are mostly orthogonal to other efforts underway.

saying that there are starving children so we should not give ones that aren't starving assistance is like the kid being told to eat his peas because there are starving children in china and the kid saying 'fine, send them my peas' the conclusion doesn't follow from the problem.

as I said earlier, it's not a zero sum game.

I disagree that knowledge must begin in the university. I think that starting from the bottom will help more people, and will end up generating higher average levels of learning faster than starting at the top.

earlier in this thread the argument was made that OLPC was junk because most kids leave school around age 10 and will never see computers again in their lives. If this is the case, where do these university students come from?

even in the US the percentage of people who have gone to college is relatively low, if you wait until that point you will miss most people.

I do know people on the ground in developing countries, and while they sometimes question the efficiency of this or that project, I don't see them arguing that the projects should be scrapped, I see them trying to take advantage of the benefits of those projects and to counter the failings.

University = starting point of knowledge transmission

Posted Jan 12, 2009 6:49 UTC (Mon) by Alterego (guest, #55989) [Link]

I agree mostly, except for where we can help.

Approximately 1 billion people in Africa, half of whom are under 25 yo, that represents 500 million people.

Lets say 250 million under 12 yo.
Do you think it is possible to send 250 million xo ? I don't.
That's worth $50 billions of hardware (not to speak of other costs).
Can _we_ (foreigners) send/help enought teachers for 250 million children ? no.

So 250 million child, lets say 25 million bachelor, 2.5 million at university.
1 machine for 10 students, that's 250 000 machines in several hundreds universities. This is possible now. (the number are certainly wrong, but not that much)

And from these universities, _they_ (developping countries) will "produce" their teachers/programmers/biologists/doctors/... which in turn will create their educational content, and educate the whole continent.

We can help in universities, because math are math, and there the teaching languages are spanish/english/french/... so we can directly share our educational content and tools. This is not the case for early education, which is very cultural dependant,