AU PPP

1 PRO P4 HP LAPTOP PC Wi Fi NEW XP 2 DVD DELL MOUS WiFi US $319.95

Fast IBM R51 Laptop PM 15 ghz 40G DVD XP wifi US $249.00

Dell Inspiron Laptop WIFI Xp Office 40gb 22ghz Intel US $249.99

THE federal Government may face a legal battle with Telstra if a competitor wins the national broadband network contract.

Half the kids there aren’t even within a schooling environment, so it’s very easy to start from scratch, Mr Srikhanta said.

So far the organisation has distributed about 500,000 laptops, mostly in South and Central America.

Another problem the organisation faces is getting volumes of laptops up to sufficient levels to be effective.

OLPC estimates a quarter, or about 10,000 children in Northern Territory schools, qualify as off-the-grid in educational terms.

The department will test the laptops, which run the open-source Linux operating system, to see if they can interoperate with its Microsoft-based infrastructure, he said.

Mr Srikhanta said, however, it was more difficult to release the laptops into remote parts of Australia than in extremely under-privileged regions of the world where no educational infrastructure existed at all.

OLPC Australia executive director Rangan Srikhanta said the organisation sent a small consignment of the laptops to the department for testing about three weeks ago.

The One Laptop per Child association, established by Massachusetts Institute of Technology visionary Nicholas Negroponte in 2005, has been working with the Northern Territory Education Department to introduce laptops into its schools.