The one laptop per child (OLPC) project should be gathering momentum in the coming months, and while it is without questions a noble cause – there is a rather big piece of the puzzle missing. The laptops have wifi which will enable the children using them to use the internet and telephony to connect with the outside world. This is great – but in practice how will that play out??

Before I go any further I want to say that I am a huge supporter of this project and even without the connectivity there is huge value in kids learning to use computers wherever they are in the world.

Lets stop and imagine for a minute that a school in the outer regions of Tanzania manages to get one laptop per child. How exactly do they then get the internet in the areas where there is no broadband?

When people have talked about this project the notion of satellite connectivity is suggested as though it is cheap.

 As a trained VSAT installer I can say this is definately not the case. For about 20 users a 1mb link is about right – and with a contention ratio of 10:1  this costs in the region of $700 per month. However if you want to use it for a whole school of 300 even a 2mb dedicated line will not be enough and that would end up costing about $20,000 per month.

Realistically schools in a majority of the worlds developing nations can not afford anywhere near the bandwidth required for the OLPC project – or even for basic needs. In order for the digital divide to be closed somewhat developing nations need to be investing in infrastructure – or potentially sell the nationalised inefficient telecoms companies so that outside companys can create competition to increase the level of service and bring the prices down.

Just to put the absurd nature of the digital divide into perspective – here in my office we have 50% more bandwidth then the entire country of Ghana….Something needs to be done!