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UK To Offer PCs For £98, Subsidized Internet Connections
Sam writes "The UK government wants to offer low-cost computers as part of a 12-month trial during Race Online 2012. The scheme, which aims to reach out to the 9.2 million adults that are not yet online, 4 million of whom are considered socially and economically disadvantaged, aims to 'make the UK the first nation in the world where everyone can use the web.' Prices will start at £98 ($156.01) for a refurbished PC, with subsidized Internet connections available for as little as £9 ($14.33) a month or £18 ($28.65) for three months. The cheap computers will run open-source software (think Linux) and will include a flat-screen monitor, keyboard, mouse, dedicated telephone helpline, delivery, and even a warranty. The cheap Internet packages will use a mobile dongle to help people access the web."
I fear the "open source software" will be very quickly replaced with "windows", just like what happened with the OLPC.
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
I think this is a great move. Kudos!
My mother can get 3G broadband for 12 AUD per month. Thats the same as USD at the moment and its in a country with low load factors and expensive infrastructure.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I live in the East End of London and am already involved in this kind of approach, but on a small scale and informally. So I think it's a a pretty good approach to supply of the basics and a better way than just stripping down perfectly viable PCs.
But, the big but, is training and support. Here Linux [we're mainly Ubuntu and variants] is slightly better because it doesn't get trashed by viruses immediately and file permissions etc. make things easier to lock down. However, I've spent 7 years on/off training people and the web, email, looking for stuff, deciding whether to trust sites etc etc. is NOT intuitive and searching, especially, is a hard subject.
So, without training, many of these PC will be underused and languish, as so many provided under various schemes do now. We prefer drop-ins currently, they're more sociable and mean you can train/help several people at once and they can provide peer support and discovery. Also, the connections can be consolidated and needn't go through mobile networks.
Just my 2p [that's a pence, non-UK folk] on this.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
Uh, doh. I ment ebay.co.uk.
Bot Assisted Blogging
In my opinion this is pretty similar to the schemes we have in Finland. Sonera, DNA and ELISA all have different schemes to provide easy Internet access to people and they've had it for a couple of years at least by now. However, they are all subscription type deals where you commit yourself to the deal for 12-24 months, then you can get a computer as cheap as 24 euro/month + 10 euro for the internet connection (incl usb-stick) and as a bonus you get 3 months of Spotify premium... or something like that ;)
Not to be the bearer of bad news , but Im sure the government will be corrupted by microsoft eventually http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/364438/microsoft-moves-in-on-marthas-98-pc-scheme ...
Though you can sell your own stuff on Amazon.co.uk too, so what you said didn't strike me as strange :P In fact I often buy from Amazon 3rd party sellers, but rarely look for stuff on eBay unless I need car parts.
which is totally what she said
Now all they need to do is get mobile coverage into the rural areas where the internet have-nots live. If you're more than 14km (in copper) from an exchange then there's every likelihood your mobile coverage is too shit for a decent data signal as well.
Nothing like keeping the herd docile, eh?
Ben Franklin:
No doubt the US will be right behind.
I'd be more worried about the asses. You need to buy a keyboard that doesn't skip letters... :p
"make the UK the first nation in the world where everyone can use the web". Right.
Most scandinavian countries probably reached this goal at least 5 years ago. The last person I knew who didn't have a computer (or internet connection) was my great-great grandmother, who died in 1997. My grandmother got her computer (winpc) and some kind of Windows 95 certification (that included IE) around 1996... And younger people are not less technical.
Sure, you can probably find some hermit out in the forests of northern Sweden who don't have any internet connection (or electricity), but I don't think that really counts.
In other words, great initiative, but there's no need to make up silly claims like that.
That's retarded a desktop PC with a crappy mobile Internet Connection.
Either sell Desktops with Broadband or laptops with dongles.
And the prices aren't that spectacular - I've bough second hand PC for less than that so I don't see what's so great about this?
Well, that was supposed to be a pun :/
Bot Assisted Blogging
The issue here is that not everyone in the UK wants to get online.
I really hope this takes off, but I suspect that by the time Microsoft, the hardware manufactures and retailers have made their "representations" to the government it will die before it starts.
I think these kind of initiatives will, unfortunately, remain with charities and keen individuals at a local level.
_ you missed the point, that your "addicts" don't get it for free. People have to pay for it. So what's the the catch in purchasing it for £98 and sell it for £50?
It's thinking .
"The scheme, which aims to reach out to the 9.2 million adults that are not yet online, 4 million of whom are considered socially and economically disadvantaged."
So, wait, geeks and nerds are now getting free computers in the UK!?
In the same way some people are happy without TV some don't care about the internet. My mother is one - she leads a perfectly happy and fulfilling life never using google or youtube etc even though she could easily afford a computer. Why do people think this is abnormal and there has to be "something done about it"? If you don't have to work from home over the internet then having internet access is merely a nice-to-have rather than an essential. I wish some people in the IT industry would understand this.
> with subsidized Internet connections available for as little as £9 ($14.33) a month
So they'll receive a contended, slow, intermittent connection that doesn't work when they actually want to go online, and eventually they give-up and let their subscription lapse.
Broadband service quality is directly proportional to cost. Anyone paying less than 30 UKP per month in the UK is undercutting the actual cost of the connection and fooling themselves.
For example TalkTalk, the largest UK ISP by subscription, allocates 150 kBps of backhaul per user so that they can "offer" monthly costs under a tenner.
Pretty funny that Swedish non-subsidized 3G internet is actually cheaper. Going from around $10-11. Praise the socialist dictatorship!
MS know they can't let any real Linux contender in (like Ubuntu) so they will offer a cheap (maybe even free) XP copy for each of these. Then they will say that people should learn software that is out in the real world, i.e Windows and Office. Of course, most of us are smart enough to know that a) it's only cheap/free while there is competition, b) MS software changes to, so people shouldn't learn specific software, but software in a more general sense.
Goverment want to do a lot of things, doesn't mean it will happen. But I guess it allows them to think up a new TAX?
It seems that I could get PC's for about half that price, that could run Ubuntu and access the Internet. So someone is going to be getting rich quick scheme. I offer my assistance for 50% commission!
Fantastic! I bet the people around where I live will really enjoy the ~30kbit/s connection they'll get from their Three dongles on these new PCs. There are hundreds, if not thousands of villages where 3G coverage is nonexistant.
" The scheme, which aims to reach out to the 9.2 million adults that are not yet online"
I'm not online.
Why?
Because they demand you don't use the service, demand the right to snoop and when they fail to deliver, tough titties. Yet if I paid 96% of the time, they'd pull be up before the court. They want all the rights and want to dump the responsibilities on to me, and reserve the right to throw me out if they aren't making enough money off me.
So I'm offline.
And this measure won't put me online.
Regulatory change would, but they aren't doing that.
"The scheme, which aims to reach out to the 9.2 million adults that are not yet online, 4 million of whom are considered socially and economically disadvantaged"
Which bit of that is hard for you to work out - ie that there are 5.2 million who arn't disadvantaged but still arn't online, most likely because they don't want to. Can you do simple maths?
I thought the government was trying to save money due to the financial mess that labour's period in power left us. We're making cuts all over the place to save money, yet here we are subsidising computers and Internet connections for those who can't afford it, and might not need it, all so we can claim some silly title. I hope these people will be properly educated in how to use computers, or these potential 9.2 million users are going to be easy prey for scammers, viruses, malware, etc.
£200 perhaps?
Bot Assisted Blogging
You didn't read the article. They are running Linux, so malware and viruses aren't going to be anything like the problem. (You can argue it's due to being a small target platform, or better design, in this case it doesn't matter as the result is the same.) Scamming, no OS can help you there. Lets leave alone the issue if it labour's fault about the world economy...though I do agree it was caused by poor regulation and no regulation, but that trend was started before labour and is still established doctrine to many...
why mobile internet on a DESKTOP? and not DSL / cable?
mobile internet has a lot less room then DSL / cable. Why have low cost DSL / cable for people in a area that can get that and mobile internet for people not in a cable or dsl area.
so you can't slipstream windows disks? there why does MS have tools and docs on how to slipstream windows?
I'm guessing because the licensing agreement allows that but doesn't allow a third party to reinstall the OS from a different disk.
When you first use that fresh computer with Windows the agreement is between you and MS. The third party does not have the right to use that code without the original disk.
Like I said
Read the licensing agreement
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
In reality the Swedish and Scandinavian prices are in fact even cheaper when you take into account the relative purchasing power parity of the average Scandinavian citizen.
Scandinavians, Norwegians in particular, have higher wages per hour, especially considering currency exchange rates, those wages pay for more than their British counterparts.
In other words Scandinavians get more Internet, for their money, for each hour they worked.
".. the big but, is training and support .. I've spent 7 years on/off training people and the web, email, looking for stuff, deciding whether to trust sites etc etc. is NOT intuitive and searching, especially, is a hard subject .."
I disagree, I worked in an Internet cafe, and any user of Windows that I let loose on my Linux desktop couldn't tell the difference. As for whether to trust sites, that's not a problem as they can't install anything by the click-and-install method.
Better?
The most basic problem with minimum wage laws is that they _guarantee_ that the least qualified are unable to find work.
In the USA the 'solution' is to subsidize the hiring of the incompetent in the hope that they will become more competent by working.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
It does sound like another one of those wonderful job creation schemes for quangos and the civil service, so beloved by Labour. Just more evidence of how little has changed with the so-called "new" government.
I predict this scheme will have very little impact in the real world, but will still be very expensive and will provide employment for a large number of administrators and bureaucrats. That's if it gets off the ground at all, which it probably won't, being far too ambitious and expensive.
The tao of democracy: the government you can vote for is not the real government.
The government wants everyone on line so that their every move and transaction can be recorded and traced. It's not some wild idea. It's why they are eager to subsidise internet connections.
When everyone is on line it will be only a matter of time before cash transactions and paperwork are banned. Then all your transactions will be logged in databases where it will be far easier to search for data about you.
It's not that governments are evil. It's just that it is human nature to seek increasing power. Each successive government retains the power of the one which preceded them and then seeks to build on it.
If you don't push back, they will increasingly control your life.
Fight back.
for ROBBING your country while your Government comes up with noble scams such as this spending your money, 400 million at the least.
Isn't this a great opportunity to push Linux into consumer market? I am an end-user who loves Linux--in theory--but I've never tried to use it. A larger base of Linux users is surely good news for developers. If this UK thing works out, I'll bet America will follow. It's a model Obama can push through on his own through executive order without facing knee-jerk GOP opposition.
The price for the hardware also doesn't seem very cheap to me. I buy refurbished computers on ebay from a guy in Illinois and get them shipped to me here in California at $100 a pop -- free shipping, no sales tax. This is for a perfectly decent P4 with 512 Mb of ram.
Find free books.
I used to work for a charity that, as part of their fund-raising, sell PCs recycled from big businesses for £50. (Link: http://www.airedalecomputers.org.uk/ )
So I'm not sure why they are charging so much when they claim they want to get everyone online.
Lithandro.co.uk
No wonder this country is so broken down:
My mobile internet costs £6.67 a month and it's not subsidised.
So the government subsidy, in these difficult times, is not only useless to the customer, it's actually WORSE than useless because it fruitlessly damages the nation's finances.
They clearly have an internal recruitment and training problem that needs to be sorted out urgently.
Talk about reaching out in the trenches and educating...this is first class.
Too little too late. The poor want the newest, greatest gadgets anyway, even if they are given things. With the new inexpensive tablets coming out of India (loaded with Linux) that are already mobile, these units will be too expensive. Someone is getting kickbacks to unload used equipment on the government (at taxpayer's) expense. Typical government activity. In the Haiti hurricane, hospitals donated equipment that was not useful to Haiti so they could take a "charity write-off" while unloading outdated supplies and equipment. Clever, huh? PITA for haiti, though, which became a sort of refuse dump for outdated stuff. There's always some ulterior motive, and now we know why many of the world's governments are going bankrupt.
Is it really government's role to provide computers and internet access to its citizens?