14 DAY TRIAL // A group of Chinese computer users rallied up in claiming that their computers are difficult to connect to the Internet, among other flaws they may have. Before you rush advising them to toss their computers out the window, I must say that they might have been set up.
The above-mentioned bunch of users are in fact Chinese farmers that have struck a deal with Internet Service Provider China Telecom. They had to subscribe to the provider's ADSL service for 27 months at least at a price of RMB198 per month. In exchange, the service provider would give each of them a free HP desktop system, as part of the "Computer plus Broadband" deal.
The monthly fee would cover the cost of 150 hours of Internet access per month, as well as the HP Compaq DX2308 computer. The program is the result of a partnership between HP and China Telecom, and started back in December 2006.
However, it seems that the farmers have been quite overcharged, since the standalone broadband subscription is RMB60 per month. Summing up, the farmers paid about $546 for the desktop computer alone. The same desktop system costs about $200 in any retailer' store, so the company played quite a hoax.
According to Cui Wu, a lawyer at the Jiangsu Shengdian law firm, the PC vendor tricked the users into buying the computers and counted on their complete lack of computer knowledge. The computer is comprised of 3.2GHz Intel Celeron D processors, 512M of system memory, 80G hard disk storage space and 17-inch CRT monitors. He advised the farmers to seek damage and even cancel their subscription.
Similar deals are also available to the inhabitants of the Jiangsu province. China Telecom and HP are providing some other offerings, such as a HP Compaq NX6515 notebook with a dual-core 1.6GHz Turion 64 X2 processor, 512MB of RAM, an 80GB hard disk and a 14-inch screen. In order to be eligible for the notebook, the user must subscribe for 1,660 hours of broadband Internet access during the school holiday at about $923. HP is trying hard to reclaim its market share in China, a market that is still dominated by the Lenovo group.
At the risk of being mean, I wonder what are the Chinese farmers using their computers for, because the system configuration may be outdated, but I'm one of those who had surfed the web on a Pentium I with 32 MB of RAM. They're cracking, I guess.