Government Scheme Offers PC With Broadband For £159

Get Online @ Home, the government scheme intended to get the last eight million UK citizens online, will offer discounted refurbished PCs with a year’s worth of broadband through TalkTalk, for £159.

Headlined by UK’s Digital Champion Martha Lane Fox, the scheme is also supported by Microsoft, Simplify Digital and a host of computer hardware recycling companies. It is part of the GO ON UK initiative launched last month to boost the digital capability of UK SMEs, charities and the remaining 8.2 million adults who have never used the Internet.

The initiative is a successor to the Race Online 2012, a two-year campaign that got 2 million Brits using the Internet for the first time.

Cheap and cheerful

“We know that the cost of buying and connecting a PC is a significant barrier and so being able to offer a PC with a year’s broadband for under £160 will be a lifeline for many,” Lane Fox told the Telegraph.

Get Online @ Home will provide refurbished desktop computers and laptops pre-loaded with Windows 7 and a Talk Talk Internet connection, ready to use out of the box, to anyone in the UK.

The price for a desktop PC without the Internet connection is £149, reduced to £99 for charities and people receiving certain benefits. Every computer comes with a 15″ flat screen monitor, keyboard, mouse, CD drive and USB ports. Contents inside may vary, but customers can count on at least a Pentium 4 2GHz processor, 1Gb of RAM and a 40Gb hard drive.

Laptops are slightly more expensive, with a £199 price tag, reduced to £169 for those less fortunate. Each will have a minimum of 1 hour standby battery life, a webcam, several USB ports, and at least a Celeron processor with 1Gb of RAM and a 40Gb hard drive.

The scheme has delivered discounted hardware since March 2011, but the new partnership with TalkTalk involves a cut in prices for computers, or broadband, depending on how you look at it.

If broadband, priced at modest £5 a month, is bought together with a Get Online @ Home PC, TalkTalk will give customers a £50 discount, making a year’s worth of broadband connection cost just £10 on top of the cost of the computer.

The offer includes 40GB monthly download allowance, a free wireless router, free set-up and unlimited evening and weekend calls to UK landlines. However, customers will also have to take TalkTalk’s £14.50/month line rental (which has to be paid to use a landline phone anyway).

“The Internet connects and entertains, educates and informs – it even saves money. Yet there are children growing up today in towns and cities that are fully broadband enabled who do not have internet access at home to support their education. TalkTalk believes that every family should be able to have safe and affordable internet access and, as theUK’s leading value for money broadband provider, this belief is at the very heart of our business. We are proud to be a founder partner of Go ON UK and make this vision a reality,” said Dido Harding, CEO of TalkTalk, at the launch of GO ON UK last month.

It is unclear why Get Online @ Home chose TalkTalk as its partner, taking into the account the company’s abysmal performance in Ofcom’s annual customer satisfaction survey.

Last month also saw the launch of the HomeKey – a £70 bootable computer on a USB running Linux, designed to give older or less able people an easy-to-use PC on cheap hardware. HomeKey’s creator, SimplicITy was very critical of the Race Online scheme, saying that the problem iis the difficulty of using Windows, not the price of hardware, and claiming that many of those trained by the initiative will have failed to carry on using their systems once the training is complete.

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