one laptop per child and mobile phones

I’ve been seeing more and more articles that run along this vein:

Ultra-low cost mobiles to steal thunder of the ‘$100 laptop’

A quick search reveals a huge number of other articles and blog entries.

I think it’s incredibly revealing to read all of these articles and comments from the movers and shakers. Not because of what it says about us, but more because of what it says about the people who are talking without knowing. The cell phone article above is a great example of what I’m talking about. It’s worth reading, but if you’re lazy I’ll point out a few interesting lines:

The weaknesses in the theory are not those touted by Gates, but rather the opposite – in a community with no electricity, will internet access really be a priority? Therefore Erlich’s objections are more realistic than Gates’s, as he points out that even $100 will be too expensive for many applications and user bases. Naturally, this leads him to promote the handset, which is being driven down to sub-$20 price tags, as a better route – though those ultralow cost devices are basic GSM phones at this stage, and a product with the real data capabilities required for social and economic change will come closer to the MIT price level.

…..

However, the biggest challenge will not be down to cheap devices, but to finding a business model for service providers delivering voice, data and multimedia to this massive new base of users with low budgets. Like free access for poorer citizens in advanced economies, the technology choice – in that case, Wi-Fi mesh – is not the problem, but how providers can make any money from the network, and if they cannot, whether governments or development agencies will prioritise funds to bridge the gap.

First of all, it appears that people like Gates and others who feel threatened by this project either don’t understand what we’re trying to do or are trying to misdirect the public about what the One Laptop project is out to do.

The first thing to understand is that we’re building this around kids and education. We’re not building it around adults. We hope and expect that the kids will bring the laptops home with them, and that might have a transformative effect on the home life as well, but that’s seen largely as a side effect of the work that we’re doing. So when Bill Gates and others make statements about cell phones in the context of the One Laptop per Child project you need to ask yourself a few questions: Do phones make good eBook readers? Do they allow for the kind of free collaboration that allows kids to learn to work together? Can kids create and share content using phones? Arguably, no. At least not very rich content. What phones do is allow people with existing relationships to communicate and do business. The question is does a phone solve the problem we’re trying to solve? The answer is no. A phone is an answer to a question, yes, but not the one that’s before us.

The second issue seems to be around viable business models around internet access and content delivery. This is also off the mark – somewhat. The first thing that you need to understand is that the kinds of things that we’re talking about doing in the One Laptop project will enable local communities and children to build and share their own content. Local solutions, local bandwith and peer to peer communication. In the western world, we’re used to consuming most of our content from upstream providers. The CNNs and Yahoos of the world. The rise of content providers and the rise of the Internet in the western world happened in concert. The Internet became valuable so people started posting content which made it more valuable, etc.

This feedback loop is something that needs to be started in the developing world as well. What better way to create local business opportunities for people in the developing world than to deliver a ready-made multi-million unit client base? Kids and their families will want better Internet access, creating an instant market. And we’ll be able to educate kids at the same time. Will local governments have to bootstrap the process? Probably, but that will happen in the context of schools, which they would have to bootstrap anyway. And in the meantime, before the Internet becomes useful to those smaller communities, they can create and share local content and educational material.

Is the One Laptop project destabilizing to the GSM providers and similarly entrenched bandwith providers? Absolutely. It creates a huge network of clients that aren’t locked into one communication method and allows new, local networks and local content to be created. Remember, it’s One Laptop per Child, not One Sim Card per Child.

I guess my point here is that it’s important to understand the context of One Laptop before taking people like Gates and the GSM folks seriously. They are answering questions that we aren’t asking.