It’s Raining OLPC Total Costs of Ownership (1 of 4)

“Implementation planning has to move beyond the per-unit cost,
it must include the solution for charging the laptops, host the
more power-hungry XS server, extend the mesh network to the
community, and connect to the Internet at least occasionally. And
that doesn’t even touch the costs of curricula development, teacher
training, and institutional changes for distribution, maintenance,
even testing.

“My 2006 TCO

“I got into a good amount of hot water by proposing that the
cost of OLPC projects went beyond (number of
students)×($100). The magic number was $972/laptop for a
5-year project. Widely decried, a few much more in-depth
explorations revealed that my back-of-the-envelope TCO calculation
was actually pretty close.”

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