Those $100 laptops have been upped to $130-$140 to be viable. Also, the crank has been replaced with a string to pull, not unlike a lawn mower. But they're such a crock! Why would governments pay millions of dollars on hand cranked laptops when they could instead be putting that money into school development and paying teachers? Countries like Nigeria have bought thousands of those machines, but perhaps they should have thought about getting all their children into schools first.

I imagine this solar powered internet is exactly the same crock. Useful for already westernised countries that need to cut down on their CO2 emissions from all trhe computers and peripherals they use, but it's like giving developing countries golden plates and cutlery when they don't have food to put on them yet.

My thinking is.
Shouldn't we be helping to bring up the standerd of living and improving health and education first? before building an internet structer?

instead of spending all this money on giving them computers and the internet why not invest in building sustainable communities, road and water infastructer, hospitals, schools and other more important things and then building the network for the internet.

Just think of the military possibilities

Why doesn't the UN go on Ebay and buy all the $100 laptops? There's tens of thousands of working $100 and sub $100 laptops right now. BUY IT NOW.

I just sent this item to tips and then noticed you already have it here!

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editor note: Thanks anyway!

First (on topic) the PVC used is not exactly tree hugger compatible. Not everything with a solar panel on it is mother nature friendly.

(Off Topic) Following up with the first commenter...
The (~)$100 laptop is school development. Once deployed teachers are no longer need to concern themselves with finding books for students to read. They can be distributed at the national level to students. (Over net connections or tranfered from other machines.)

I don't think anyone is saying we don't need teachers. Computers can be a tool used in the teaching process like a book, a pencil, or a graphing calculator. Providing laptops to children should allow teachers to spend less time trying to gather teaching materials and more time teaching.

Ben,
One of the big problems in the development of developing countries is training people to maintain expensive and advanced infrastructure. Which is to say often when western donors plop expensive 'Thingies' into the dust, it often quickly breaks and noone has the money or the skill to fix it. Or perhaps worse, the wrong expensive thingie isn't used at all. Or much worse, a thingie is brought in and is quickly dismantled by scavengers once the installers are gone.

Expanding the internet cheaply and realiably, allows more effective communication about needs for thingies, state of thingies, and online education about how to protect, maintain and fix said thingies.

This project is aimed at doing that. I am sure there are plenty o other sues as well, such as less reliance on inneficient and/or politcally corrupt agencies for internet/phone access, and to some degree, power access. Terrorsts love to hit power and communication lines as they are easy targets...with this, no more.

Like Electric penguin, I take the attitude that whatever we can give to the third world countries to assist them with their development must be good. Not enough teachers? Do we wait while more people go through the expensive teacher training process, or do we give the kids the where withall to teach themselves?
Same with schools, and education isn't limited to the 3 R's. A lot of these people don't have media access in any meaningful way. This tool, with the internet addition, gives them the ability to access all sorts of information: health, hygiene, food growing - you name it, it's an opportunity.

And before any doubt sayers start hollering that they'll also learn how to make bombs, etc - a lot of them learn that early ewnough already, without going to the trouble of learning off the interent.

As for the use of e-bay cast offs - for a start, how many of them have self contained power supplies? No 110v / 220v outlet is available in a lot of these countries, so whatever is developed, must be completely self contained. How many are available? Four million is the number being mooted for the launch customers. Can you match that from ebay?

Nothing is new under the sun. I remember many years ago, while I was still at school, a missionary society in Australia was producing Bible studies using vinyl recordings and a hand cranked acoustic phonograph. They did this for many years, supplying the natives of Papua New Guinea with their texts, and from all accounts, they were very well received.

The technology has changed, but the ideas are the same.

To Electric Penguin:

While the laptops may allow some savings in books (although then again, it would perhaps still cost a lot of money to get the electronic versions for the laptops), surely you agree that in third world countries, there are much bigger problems than getting enough books? getting teachers, classrooms, furniture and other resources for those classrooms, and perhaps most importantly, getting children in those classrooms. There's too many of those kids helping out at home or being in worse situations, for example child soldiers.

The money used to buy those laptops could be used to help a lot of those existing problems. Maybe those laptops will be useful one day but there has to be some foundations built first.

The only innovation here is that the device moderates its own power use depending on the available sun. That's very cool, but it has nothing to do with developing countries, most of whom have plenty of sun hours per day.

As for wireless mesh networks, wifi is the wrong technology for the job. It has buzz and that attracts money, but the radio layer isn't suited for this sort of thing. I wish the press would realize that, and stop fellating any project that wants to do cool but inappropriate things with a technology that was meant for other things.

Having lived in Zimbabwe for many years, I think they will be very useful in underdeveloped countries -- in the schools, as well as for general awareness and democracy -- unless the governments restrict their use.

As for using old laptops, there should be a lot of them, considering how many are produced all the time, and probably that many of those are bought by people and companies to replace old laptops. Any computers would be useful, not just laptops.

Using old computers is also more envirnonmentally sound, as producing electronics is very ditry.

So I think it would be more effective to develop hand cranks to use with computers, and donate many old computers to developing societies.

I'd recommend reading the FAQ on the "One Laptop Per Child" for a good discussion of the whys involving the $100 laptop: http://www.laptop.org/faq.en_US.html

With that as underpinning, it seems like some of the commenters above haven't really considered what MIT and the UN are trying to do. On the website they discuss the notion of using recycled computers instead, and show why that wouldn't really work very well. To summarize and expand: recycled machines will take man-hours to refurbish, aren't nearly sturdy enough, and have to be plugged in to a socket. The MIT/UN laptop can be dropped (no hard disk) and never needs to be plugged in; try that with your four-year-old Dell.

It's possible that the MIT/UN laptop will be another Segway: lots of talk but in the end not very successful. Or it may be WILDLY successful in ways which we can't even imagine. Let's give it a chance to succeed or fail or muddle through.

Anyone wanting a bit of inspiration on this topic should look up the NY Times article from a few months ago on cell phone usage & adoption in Africa. Two teasers: #1 the lady who every week takes her 12-volt car battery ~25 miles to a place where it can be recharged, then returns home and charges people (who pay gladly!) to hook their cell phones up to it to charge them; #2 the guy who charges people with cell-phones to climb up the large tree he owns/controls where he built a ladder and platform, upon which you are now high and unobstructed enough to connect to a distant cell tower!

That would be so great if green thinking was applied to as many spheres of our lives as possible. The stories you described here are really neat)

Hi there, I locate in U.S. where technology is advanced unlike Somalia where I came from. People in SomaIia life in a dark place specially at night. I always dream about how I could help to bring lighting technology such as Solar power. I do not knew where to start and how to start. Any comments will be helpful. Thank you

I work in education in a developing country and think that this is absolutely brilliant! Our school has telephone and free internet (solar powered) but to host a network I need to put in batteries, inverter, more solar cells, router, etc. This does it all for me.

And technology like this IS the way to improve the situation in developing countries. You can build a road for another country, or give them food, or build a hospital, or send aid money, but none of that is the answer long term. The answer is to teach and train people in that country to be able to do these things themselves. Education is very important in this, and the internet is very helpful.

Glen, Talua