 One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)* is a non-profit organization, founded by MIT Professor Nicholas Negroponte* and a team of educators, developers and technologists. The organization is dedicated to educating children in developing countries, with the ultimate goal of eradicating poverty. To achieve that goal, OLPC has developed the XO laptop, a fully featured, inexpensive wireless computing device that was designed for deployment to primary and secondary school children in emerging markets. These machines use built-in wireless capabilities that support WiFi and full collaborative multi-media capability. They can be used as a conventional computer, electronic book, handheld game console and even function as a TV. XO laptops are sold to governments and issued to children by schools on a basis of one laptop per child.
 Nortel is a founding sponsor of OLPC. John Roese, Nortel CTO, is a member of the OLPC board. Nortel's involvement in OLPC is a testament to our leadership in driving the industry to a new era of communications - that we call hyperconnectivity - where everyone and everything that should be connected are connected. Nortel contributes monetary resources to the research and development for the OLPC XO laptop initiative as well time of its engineers, researchers, and scientists.
While the XO laptop is not a Nortel product, it is a tool to stimulate the R&D teams to consider new communication models of hyperconnectivity, new programming models and new collaboration methods. It also represents a new type of client, as well as new economic and networking models that are possibly a reflection of the future nature of broadband networking. It is our belief that all of this has direct impact in creating innovative approaches to tackle the challenge and seize the opportunity of hyperconnectivity. Additionally, the success of OLPC could add a few billion new users to the Internet, further stressing the scale of the telecom infrastructure. Our involvement with OLPC reinforces our desire to use technology to inspire learning and help improve education, health care and trade in developing markets. Nortel seeks to help develop communities that have little or no existing communications infrastructure and capabilities, and is committed to digital and social inclusion in emerging markets. To complement our involvement in OLPC, Nortel is a founding sponsor of open80211s*. open80211s is a consortium of companies who are sponsoring and collaborating in the creation of an open-source implementation of the emerging IEEE 802.11s wireless mesh standard. The resulting software will run on Linux on commodity PC hardware. Nortel believes that a high-quality open-source reference implementation will accelerate the creation and adoption of the IEEE 802.11s mesh standard. An open source implementation of this standard has the potential to help OLPC reduce the cost and increase the accessibility of OLPC school servers, for example. In late 2007, Nortel was honored for its involvement in OLPC by Every Child is Sacred, (ECIS), an organization that promotes a culture of appreciation, honoring, celebrating and partnering with "villagers" and "villages" who share the ECIS vision of creating child-friendly communities, cities and nations. ECIS believes that Nortel's involvement in OLPC shows that Nortel is an organization that honors children and champions the rights of children. Nortel's involvement in OLPC is complimented by a number of other community relations and research initiatives, including: In the News
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