| Chapter 1: | A Global, Low-Cost Network Thrives |
“one laptop per child” project (http://www.laptop.org/) in developing nations later in 2006 or in early 2007, shipping 5–10 million, $135 computers to China, India, Thailand, Egypt, the Middle East, Nigeria, Brazil, and Argentina. Partners on the project include the UN, Nortel, Red Hat, AMD, Marvell, Brightstar, and Google. The computers will be equipped with Wi-fiand will be able to hook up to the Internet through a cell-phone connection. The developers hope to see the price of the computers drop to $100 by 2008, and as low as $50 per unit in 2010. “We’re going to be below 2 watts [of total power consumption]. That’s very important because 35% of the world doesn’t have electricity,” Negroponte said. “Power is such a big deal that you’re going to hear every company boasting about power” in the near future. “That is the currency of tomorrow” (Spooner, 2006).
In responding to this survey’s optimistic 2020 operating-system and access scenario, foresight expert Paul Saffo, director of The Institute for the Future, wrote, “My forecast is that we will see neither nirvana nor meltdown, but we will do a nice job of muddling through. In the end, the network will advance dramatically with breathtaking effect on our lives, but we won’t notice because our expectations will rise even faster.”
Additional Responses
Many other survey respondents shared comments tied to the scenario about the future of the global network. Among them:
“This is the direction that technology and economics and markets are moving. However, the desire by large owners of telecommunications pipes (e.g., cable companies, DSL providers) to control traffic (i.e., by disallowing bits they don’t approve from traveling on their part of the network) could balkanize the Internet.” —Howard Rheingold, Internet socio-logist and author