Internet

This page is for topics related to internet-access for the One Laptop Per Child project schools and the technologies that could be used, including regular dial-up or broadband and other methods.

Internet connectivity

Although OLPC itself is assuming that there won't be connections in many places, some laptops will be deployed in cities that have some type of Internet connectivity, even if it is more expensive and lower bandwidth than what Americans are used to.

OLPC is selling Laptops to governments. The governments will have to decide what Internet connections they can afford to include in the package they provide to schools.

OLPC project's role

Since the OLPC is primarily an educational project, we are less concerned with providing Internet access to kids and more concerned with providing a laptop that is capable of networking locally. Since both the Internet, and the OLPC laptop use the standard IP protocols, there are numerous ways in which schools, towns and countries can extend connectivity beyond the built-in mesh network.

Child friendly internet

for details, see Internet safety

We expect that most countries will not want to just dump the kids onto the global Internet, but will want to build their own Internet that provides a rich variety of resources targetted to children and available in their own language.

• David Pogue on the safety of the Internet for young children.

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Web-access by email

In some parts of the world, there are no ISPs (Internet Service Providers) offering web-accces, just email-only access to the internet. In such cases, an Email Auto-responder, can be used to get web-pages.

Public email auto-responders like this already exist, but they are often overloaded and not working. An email auto-responder restricted to OLPC schools would be better. A private auto-responder would avoid overload and mean that additional functions could be added, to get copies of small websites, web-directories, search-engine results, eBooks, Software, learning-material, etc.

The ability to obtain web-pages would give children and teachers in these email-only areas much greater access to information and some limited hands-on experience of the World Wide Web. The service could be restricted to web-pages from a private OLPC internet for a particular country, to ensure content is suitable for children.

See the list of Open Source email auto-responder software in the 'Web access via email' section of the eBook How To Accelerate Your Internet.

Accessing the internet on slow connections

Bandwidth management

The BMO (Bandwidth Management and Optimization) Book Sprint Team website has a free eBook How To Accelerate Your Internet - A practical guide to Bandwidth Management and Optimisation using Open Source Software. It covers all aspects of getting the best performance out of a slow internet connection (Dial-Up Modem, etc). It includes configuring servers and browsers, etc, and Bandwidth Management, so that each user gets a fair share of the bandwidth on a shared connection, preventing large file-downloads, peer-to-peer file-sharing and VOIP phone calls slowing it down for everyone else.

Text-only browsing

There are various websites for accessing the web on slow connections, displaying text, not graphics. For example Aidworld/Aptivate has a website called Loband.

Web-page compression

'Web-page compression' is another way to speed-up web-browsing and reduce page load-times. If children are only allowed access to websites on a virtual-private OLPC internet, then each site can be compressed using a specialized program when it is published on the web-server. If they are accessing other people's public internet sites then some ISPs offer page-compression (advertised as a ratio of 5:1), where user's set-up there browsers to get pages via the Internet Service Provider's proxy server. If an ISP doesn't offer it, then the OLPC project could set up their own proxy server for schools to use. The web-browser requests a page, the proxy server gets it from the website, compresses it and returns it to the browser. Most browsers support open compression standards and can decompress the page. If not, plug-in software can be installed.

There are commercial programs for web-page compression, such as OnSpeed.

For more information, see WebSiteOptimization.com - HTTP Compression and Wikipedia: High-speed Dial-Up.

--Ricardo 12:53, 14 September 2007 (EDT)