Education: Malaysian TelCo to sponsor Netbook/broadband package for students

The scheme will run for two years and there will be 100,000 machines available.

Priority will be given to freshers from low-income families.

National News Agency says that, in 2008, there were more than 800,000 students studying in tertiary education in Malaysia, about half of them in state-run education.

However, no announcement has been made on the brand nor - more importantly - the operating system.

Illegal copies of software are rampant in developing countries, particularly amongst students, and Malaysia is no exception. With a population where many people earn less than USD400 per month, even with student loans and student discounts real software is unaffordable. The culture of stealing software remains with the students after they leave. Enforcement against students is non-existent.

TM has a golden opportunity to reverse that trend: if it were to introduce the systems with Linux pre-installed, the students would realise that it a viable - and completely workable - alternative to Windows. And that OpenOffice.Org is a genuine alternative to MS Office. Firefox and other browsers easily match IE and the new Thunderbird 3 is an excellent mail program.

But there is a downside: Malaysia's international broadband connections are notoriously slow: Australian businesses have openly said that this is a factor when deciding on whether to make or increase inward investment. A new cable, shared with Singapore is coming on line in Singapore this month and later this year in Malaysia. That will be both faster and have greater capacity although the effect it has on congestion will depend on who is switched to it - file sharers and serial downloaders don't mix with premium business customers; and students often fall into the first category. 100,000 "always on" new subscribers will provide a serious challenge to the external infrastructure.

There is no hint that the machines will be tied to the University infrastructure and therefore allow the University to monitor the use of the machines for illegal file-sharing, downloads or bandwidth use.