Better late than never..
A plan to provide Jordanian university students with affordable laptops is finally being implemented.
Jordan Times:
AMMAN – A pilot project to provide university students with laptops at “competitive†prices is scheduled to start during the upcoming academic year, which begins in late September.Under the Ministry of Information and Communications Technology’s initiative, university students will be able to purchase high-quality laptops at a price of $420 with monthly instalments of $10, Nidal Qanadilo, ICT promotions and investments director at the ministry, told The Jordan Times on Tuesday.
“We will implement the project during the coming semester, starting with 10,000 laptops in two or three public and private universities, and during the second semester, we will officially launch the project to cover all universities,†Qanadilo added.
According to the official, some 40,000-50,000 laptops will be made available annually in an effort to increase university students’ IT knowledge.
With only 10% of the Jordanian population using the internet, such moves are needed if we want to have any chance of becoming an IT enabled knowledge society.
Another important aspect is, of course, the cost of internet access, which, despite the recent discounts, is still expensive for many people.
A positive development on that front is the recent announcement by Umniah CEO Joseph Hanania that the company will be launching its mobile broadband WiMax services within the coming two months. The coverage will start in selected areas of Amman where there is high concentration of computer users.
The practicality of WiMax remains to be seen. It is still a new technology and I could not easily find articles or blog posts from actual end users describing their experience with real WiMax services.
I personally hope Umniah proves the skeptics wrong. Jordan desperately needs more broadband subscribers. According to recent press reports, there are now around 70,000 broadband lines in Jordan, a 22 fold increase from 2002. But again this number is very low. Maybe WiMax can be a factor in increasing the broadband user base.
Comments
6 responses to “Cheap laptops for Jordanian students and other positive IT developments”
I don’t think that providing school or university students with Laptops or Internet access will enhance their knowledge, competitiveness or have an effect on the teaching process.
A large number of people now in Jordan have PCs, Internet Access (at least dial-up) or going to Internet cafes. Are they using it in a useful way? Most of them are not.
We always use things to work against us. Steps should be done to make people use these things in a way beneficial to them.
People Priorities are silly, 3azayem and Wajaha over Education and Books, for example.
>Steps should be done to make people >use these things in a way beneficial to them.
Like having Linux preinstalled instead of windows for example. It would make sense since this is for the benefit of education.
Bilal excuse me but I don’t agree with you at all. Having laptops and internet in schools will teach the new generations about the importance of information technology in education. Maybe now most of the arabs don’t use the internet in the best way but things will change. The future is in technology, and not building high rise blocks or tiling the sea. We have great opportunity to have a better future if we used our resources in technology.
http://entrepreneur.meetup.com/1369
Another global initiative:
One laptop per Child
One Laptop per Child (OLPC) is a non-profit association dedicated to research to develop a $100 laptop—a technology that could revolutionize how we educate the world’s children. This initiative was launched by faculty members at the MIT Media Lab. It was first announced by Lab co-founder Nicholas Negroponte, now chairman of OLPC, at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland in January 2005.
few clarifications here:
I’m rather impressed with the 70k number Jordan managed to rack in terms of broadband users, of course that’s if a 128kbps connection shared by a whole building by means of a cheap IP-switch and dangling Ethernet cables is considered as broadband!
at any measure; knowing that Saudi Arabia with all its might and wealth only managed 400k broadband subs; that’s comparable if not even better all together.
Regarding Umniah’s announcement, a correction here; they will launch fixed wireless broadband service, notice the term fixed, its not mobile, they might use the mobile variant of WiMax, but they can only sell it in fixed format, think of it as a last-mile wireless ADSL cable, so no; you won’t roam the streets with broadband connection(who needs that anyway?)
What you will probably get is a modem-like devise with either Ethernet, Wi-Fi (interesting?) or USB 2.0 connectivity to your machine; the modem itself will either have an external antenna placed onto the the roof of the building or will sport an internal antenna (less likely), it won’t be before 3rd quarter of 09 until you see laptops shipped ready with WiMax modem.
Umniah won’t be the only player, they share the 3.6GHz band with another company called (or probably will be called) “ClearWire”, which is part owned by an American parent company with the same name.
And unless a breakthrough happens, non of the other mobile operators (including XPress) will be offering 3G services (including wireless mobile broadband) until summer 09 by a regulatory decree (the TRC).
PS: that’s about the same time 2 years ago when you reposted my humble comment on 360east’s front page regarding GPS in Jordan and triggered me to start my own blog, it was inspiring honestly…
Well, maybe this initiative will tentatively hide the effect of the problem and not the root cause, enhancing the educational system require more comprehensive and serious actions at all levels.. however, and comparing with ‘doing nothing’ this initiative will be good step.