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Technology news and Jobs 
Fuzzy Logic A $0 laptop is not free and never will be!
Fuzzy Logic A $0 laptop is not free and never will be! | A $0 laptop is not free and never will be! |
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| by Alex Zaharov-Reutt | |
| Saturday, 24 May 2008 | |
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Page 3 of 3 Let’s face it, a $700 laptop which has very basic specs today is going to be terribly out of date within three years. In the $700 range, you’re talking about basic Intel Celeron type processors, not the Intel Core 2 Duo processors seen in $1500 laptops. We’re also seeing quad-core processors as standard in many desktop computers, in three years time we’ll surely be seeing plenty of quad-core processors in laptops, too. There’s also the issue of mobile broadband costs. Already, we know that $70 of the $99 per month in Telstra’s $0 upfront deal goes towards the 1GB of mobile Next G broadband per month. The other $29 goes towards paying off the laptop and the mobile broadband USB modem. Today, Vodafone charges $39 per month for 5GB of broadband, Optus charges $49 per month for 6GB. Three charges the same for 6GB, $29 for 3GB and $15 for 1GB. While the future size of Three’s network is in question, Vodafone and Optus plan to have 96% or higher population coverage by the end of the year, going a long way to matching Telstra’s 98.9% coverage. What will mobile broadband costs be by the end of 2008 when Optus and Vodafone also have Australia-wide 3.5G HSDPA coverage? What will Three be forced to charge when its network will only offer broadband in the cities, with regional use stuck at $1.65 per megabyte roaming fees? Chances are that prices will fall dramatically. Even for Telstra. So, anyone paying $70 per month for 1GB of bandwidth is going to feel mightily ripped off for paying so much, even though they voluntarily signed a deal that meant they would be paying this amount for 36 months. Three has a mobile broadband deal that is exclusively available through Dick Smith Electronics (DSE) in Australia, letting you pay $29 for 3GB per month and $49 for 6GB per month – with no fixed contract - as a reader in my previous $0 laptop story noted. The page at the DSE website with this information is here. So, there are plenty of alternative options out there. And if all you can afford is a $700 laptop, chances are you already have some kind of computer, especially if you are already in business. Save up the money, delay your purchase for a few months instead of going for instant gratification, and buy a laptop outright, and do your research on which mobile broadband plan is the best for you. Telstra’s benefits of the fastest speed and widest range right now will be very important for some users and thus can’t be avoided, but 2009 will see the mobile broadband landscape – and it’s pricing - change dramatically once more, just as it changed dramatically in 2007.
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