The rugged XO sub-notebook may have been a real success in the developing countries, but more and more schools across America and the United Kingdom are adopting it for educational purposes. I have told you in a previous article last year about the organization's agreement to deliver 15,000 XO units to the Birmingham schools.

The promised sub-notebooks are scheduled to arrive until April this year, and as their arrival is getting closer and closer, the Birmingham Board of Education members have to fight another aspect, that was previously overlooked: the need of a wireless infrastructure to allow the new XO notebook owners to surf the web more or less at will.

The XO deal was negotiated by John Katopodis, adviser to Mayor Larry Langford. The former came to the board meeting with Bob McKenna, Langford's liaison to the City Council. In fact, McKenna was the one to raise the problem of wireless access, as he was told this is an important part of the program during last week's seminar on the XO Laptop in Boston.

Birmingham Board of Education members learned today that they will have to provide wireless Internet service in every school in order to use the XO Laptop, which every student in grades one to eight will receive in March. "You need to add a router to every school and as long as there is one, every computer in that field can tap into it," he claimed. "Depending on what type of router you buy, it's about $39 plus a monthly fee."

The problem was solved by a company in Texas that is willing to donate all the required routers, in order to extend the Wi-Fi spectrum all across the city. "We're starting with the churches, but we're not stopping there. We'll go to fire stations and we're even talking about putting one on top of City Hall that will cover a one-mile radius."

The need for wireless access is at least doubtful, since the rugged notebooks were designed for the rural, desert environments, where there's a scarce probability of finding a hotspot (except for the ones that are in direct sunlight). The mesh networking capabilities allow the laptops to connect to each other in a cluster, in order to share files or chat.

The real issue that should be paid extra attention to is students accessing inappropriate content once the wireless Internet connection is up and running.