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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.
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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 ;)
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
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 :/
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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!?
Teaching them how to use a computer isnt "leading" the poor?
Your right, we need some tough love like, not feeding them, or allowing them to have heat in the winter!!
Thin that herd out, amiright? /sarc
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
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.
On the plus side, it looks like Microsoft is offering Windows 7 Starter Edition - the version that has horrible process limits and various other crap. If anything's likely to put people off Microsoft, it's Windows 7 Starter Edition...
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I'm not convinced by that. I was getting 50KB/s downloads via my phone when I visited my mother (in rural north Devon) for about a year before ADSL was enabled on her exchange. Even now, she only gets 1Mb/s from ADSL.
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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.
They're talking about mobile broadband, which is fast enough for web browsing (online shopping, bill payment, and so on). I know a few people who paid about this much for their Internet. They were geeks, but they had high-speed connections at work so only needed something for email and light browsing at home.
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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.
If there are no jobs cause your allowing companies to send jobs overseas, then there will be poor people who cannot work. Alot of these people WANT to work, but they cannot find a damn job.
You just want them to go away, aka die. You've obviously never been in a bad situation. I have, I couldnt find work anywhere. I was damn near air dropping resumes, and filling out applications for hours on end.
It was government assistance that kept me from starving. I now have a job where I pay almost (prob more if you include sales taxes, vehicle taxes, etc )as much in taxes that I was getting from the government.
Walk a mile in someone else's shoes.
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
there is a tie between tea partyism and grammar nazism?
i left you some more mistakes to correct
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
"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?
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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.
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.
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.
Which one of the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition is that again?
Free Martian Whores!
Citation needed. Bear in mind that in Benjamin Franklin's time the vast majority of the population worked back-breaking labour and lived in horrific poverty just to make people like him rich. And that the most functional societies today are those with the most generous welfare provisions.
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.
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.