July 17, 2007
Thin clients, not laptops, may be developing-world solution
It’s nice to hear One Laptop Per Child and Intel have patched up their differences, but will two heads be better than one in solving the problem of providing schoolkids with computers in the developing world?
Stephen Dukker, chief executive of Silicon Valley’s nComputing, thinks not and has a seven-computers-for-the-price-of-one solution of his own.
“Can you do serious work for eight hours on a seven-inch screen?” he asks of the OLPC laptop and Intel’s Classmate PC.
“They are not right for these markets because the support ecosystem is not there and they won’t be as long as it’s charitable - the governments don’t have the people to do the infrastructure.”
“They are products for college students in the developed world who can’t afford a notebook, and I think they would sell very well in our markets.”
Mr Dukker should know: he co-founded eMachines in the 1990s, which helped drive down PC prices in the West to around $400. He says the industry has hit a wall on pricing since, although PCs now have the power of the old mainframe computers.
With this in mind, he is pushing the out-of-fashion idea of thin clients. One PC in a classroom equipped with nComputing’s plug-in card and software can be linked to up to six of its little black boxes, which have connections for keyboards, mice and monitors.
The main PC’s processing power is able to drive an operating system and programs on the other six terminals. With four PCs and the $70 boxes daisy-chained to them, a classroom computer lab for 28 pupils can be set up for a fraction of the normal cost.
NComputing’s solution is gaining traction in rural US school districts and the developing world.
In the UK, Ndiyo is a not-for-profit initiative that combines both charitable aims with a similar belief in thin clients.
Ndiyo, whose commercial spin-off DisplayLink enables multiple monitors to be connected to a PC through a USB connection, has produced a similar black box to nComputing’s, called Nivo.
Nivo will also cost less than $100 and Ndiyo envisages 20 such boxes being run off a single PC server in a developing-world internet café.
Both nComputing and Ndiyo say their solutions are greener as well – standalone PCs tend to consume around 100 watts each, while their thin-client boxes consume just five watts of power.
