Thin clients switch on digitally excluded

A project to tackle digital exclusion in socially deprived regions of Merseyside has brought free plug-and-play internet access to hundreds of homes with children of school age.

The project is aiming to give digitally excluded families a leg up onto the internet by installing thin client Windows PCs, complete with the MS Office suite, in their homes. It's the brainchild of the Advanced Internet Methods and Emergent Systems (Aimes) Centre at Liverpool University, working in collaboration with housing associations and local schools.

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Two 12-month pilots are currently running in the St Helens and Anfield areas of Liverpool, involving 250 and 400 homes respectively, with a third pilot due to start shortly in Tranmere targeting another 250 internet-less homes. But the hope is to turn the pilot into an ad-funded service and scale it up to 5,000 homes in those areas over the next three years, according to Professor Dennis Kehoe, director of Aimes.

Digital exclusion is a complex issue, says Kehoe. It's not necessarily that families cannot afford the hardware to get online - although that certainly can be a factor; but there are many technical barriers to entry, such as selecting an ISP and setting up and maintaining a broadband service.

Kehoe told silicon.com: "One of the things that really came to the fore when we looked at [digital exclusion] in addition to the usual cost problems, it was really the technical barrier that one needed to cross, to hurdle, to actually avail yourself of modern day information technology."

In order to provide an internet service that was not dependent on technically savvy users, Aimes decided to run a managed service via thin clients. The use of thin client computing means users are supported remotely by technicians and do not therefore have to worry about installing antivirus, firewalls, web filters etc, or doing updates. Problems can also be fixed remotely by the handful of helpdesk staff employed to support the users.

As many of the homes involved in the project don't have landlines installed - instead relying on mobile phones only - Aimes decided to use wireless mesh network technology for last mile connectivity. Wireless also has the advantage of being easily scalable, said Kehoe, and allows individual areas to be targeted.

Funding for the pilots has come from a variety of sources including community groups, public sector organisations and also registered social landlords, who see benefits in digital technology to help reduce tenant churn in their properties and in order that they can contact tenants via email.

Meanwhile, in St Helens, the project has benefited from being able to make use of the council's metropolitan area network for backhaul - sharing the resource with a school. "It's increasing the utilisation of resources the council's already invested in so it makes sense to them," Kehoe explains.

The running costs per user (excluding the initial hardware) for the managed service are small - around £2 per week - and in future Kehoe envisages an ad-funded model being able to support service provision, with public sector organisations such as Primary Care Trusts, job centres and local councils paying to get targeted messages to otherwise hard-to-reach individuals and communities.

Government, local authorities and communities are starting to wake up to wider social benefits of breaking down digital divides in deprived communities, Kehoe adds; be it boosting skills and access to educational resources, helping to drive local economic activity, improving access to information for disabled or less able people, or even helping policing and tackling anti-social behaviour.

Kehoe says: "They [councils] have some very stringent targets on worklessness and they've woken up to this correlation between social exclusion and digital exclusion and they can see that through digital inclusion - or digital equality - there is a lever there, they can do something about that and that can then impact on social exclusion."

And how are the new internet users taking to the service?

The anecdotal evidence is good, according to Kehoe. "We've not had anybody switch the service off," he says. "Usage has been growing fairly exponentially… They're on MSN, they're looking at eBay, they're looking at the BBC - they're doing all the kind of things that everybody else does."

Kehoe adds: "We'll look back in 20 years' time on computing in the early part of this century and we'll say it was ridiculous. You had to buy some hardware and then you had to have an operating system and some applications and you had to blend all that with the TCP-IP service from a telco provider and you had to make sure their firewall protection and your operating system firewall protection were enabled…

"It's a complete nonsense, it really is, even to people who're technically able. I don't know anybody who's home computing works in any way that approaches a reasonable service."