Ditch PCs For A Networked Nation

Martha Lane Fox’s plan to get all Britons of working age online by 2015 is achievable but, in my opinion, we must end our love affair with PCs to do so. There will soon be 2billion PCs in use globally according to analyst predictions. I believe that at least 50 percent of these are surplus to purpose – they’re expensive to own, carbon wasting, highly insecure and go way beyond the simple computing requirements of many consumers.

Walk-in centres and libraries are not the answer to mass adoption either. For most people the technology to access the web needs to be fully integrated into their lives, accessible from home at least, for it to be effective and accepted in its use. A now dated 90s Blair-esque mentality of a PC in every home is no longer viable in these cash-strapped times. We cannot afford to waste money on expensive desktop hardware when there just isn’t a need, and far more fit for purpose technologies exist.

Leveraging hosted resources

The reason is that we now have virtualisation, cloud computing and green data centres at our disposal. We (almost) have widely accessible broadband for the whole country too. Data and power doesn’t need to reside on the desktop in every UK home, adding to electricity costs, carbon footprint and opening the consumer up to myriad security risks. We should be leveraging and extending these hosted resources to deliver ‘information in every home’ instead of PCs.

Thin clients, zero clients even, linked to cloud services and good bandwidth web connections provide the level of computing power most of us need, but are more than 50 percent cheaper to own. They are also 90 percent greener on energy use and require far fewer materials to manufacture, making them an all round win-win.

Thin clients even take up less space in the home and have the potential to be integrated into other systems and technologies, the TV for example. Despite some early concerns about security, cloud-based services also have a far better chance of fighting growing Internet security issues than ‘leaky’ PCs do because the administration of systems is centralised and not left in the hands of consumers without knowledge.

Internet on the TV

So what about those people that don’t want to see a keyboard and computer screen in their homes, never mind a PC? That’s a harder task and one that may never be converted in full. However the convergence of TV technology with web technology makes it hugely possible for the TV to become the Internet access point in all broadband connected homes. We are constantly hearing about websites and online services being turned into ‘apps’ for the Blackberry and iPhone. With the right effort and intent, the same could be achieved for use via a digibox or games console.

In Merseyside, an area including some of the poorest wards in the UK and now a target for David Cameron’s ‘big society’ vision, the CommunityNet Digital Inclusion project was established through a local public/private partnership. This was designed to enable individuals, regardless of personal circumstances, to access low cost, convenient computing and Internet technology. Its challenge was to provide some of the most digitally excluded households in Merseyside with low-cost, low-energy ICT access, as a managed service.

While it is early stages with this project it has already given hundreds of digitally excluded individuals access to home computing that they couldn’t otherwise afford. However, many digital inclusion projects are under threat as IT spending gets cut. Simple access to the web via a thin client could offer an alternative which would be far cheaper to implement and own, and it would result in frontline government savings as more citizens manage services online.

There’s no doubt in my mind that as a culture we are far too in love with our hardware to achieve a real information revolution. The Networked Nation project must be about getting information to people, not filling our homes with bulky, costly and unnecessary PCs.

Lisa Layzell is CEO of thin client vendor Thinspace