BUSINESS - One Laptop per Child Becomes a Reality - May 2007

Nicholas Negroponte founder and chairman of One Laptop per Child - Becomes a Reality in Uruguay - photo David Weekly Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Licens

Tuesday May 1, 2007

A Reality With Wavion Solutions in Uruguay - Wavion Base Stations to Provide Wi-Fi Infrastructure to the Pioneering OLPC Project in Uruguay

YOQNE'AM, Israel -- (BUSINESS WIRE)

Wavion, a company transforming the Metro and Rural Wi-Fi market with a new category of Wi-Fi Base Station, and the Technological Laboratories of Uruguay (LATU), the organization leading the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program in Uruguay, known as the CEIBAL Project (Basic Connectivity for Education), today announced the deployment of Wavion’s solutions in Uruguay. Wavion’s base stations will deliver high-speed wireless Internet (Wi-Fi) to schools in several provinces and to the towns and villages.

“We applaud LATU for their pioneering project in Uruguay,” said OLPC visionary and founder Nicholas Negroponte. “This is the first OLPC nationwide deployment project in the world where internet connectivity is provided both at schools and at the pupils’ towns and homes, thus significantly enhancing the learning experience by extending the learning process beyond the school hours and enabling the children to share their experience with their families and friends.”

The unique and powerful digital beamforming technology embedded in Wavion’s spatially adaptive base stations provides extended range and penetration, minimizes dead spots. It requires about one third fewer units than other competing access points (APs) to cover the same area, and provides a high quality network for all the variety of applications enabled by Wi-Fi. Wavion’s technology significantly improves the link gain and quality to 802.11 standards-based Wi-Fi clients – such as those found in OLPC’s XO laptop and other notebook computers.

“After lengthy comparative testing and careful selection process, we have chosen Wavion as one of the main technologies to deliver wireless Internet access in the CEIBAL project,” said Miguel Brechner, President of LATU. “Thanks to the CEIBAL project and to Wavion’s Wi-Fi technology, we’re able to bring the benefits of wireless broadband access to remote communities in Uruguay and provide internet connectivity to the children in these communities both at their schools and their homes. This is the first step in our plan to provide such level of connectivity to all the provinces of Uruguay.”

“We’re proud to be selected by LATU for their pioneering OLPC project in Uruguay and honored in taking part in the OLPC vision and making it a reality,” said Tal Meirzon, Wavion’s CEO. ”Our superior performance in terms of range, throughput and indoor penetration has been critical to the success of this project.”

About Wavion

Wavion is transforming the metro Wi-Fi and rural markets with a new category of spatially adaptive base stations. The company’s digital beamforming and SDMA technologies are the first and only to resolve the significant performance, penetration and profitability challenges facing large scale metro and rural deployments. Wavion is privately held and backed by world-class investors including Tel Aviv-based Elron Electronic Industries Ltd. (ELRN), and BRM Capital. Wavion headquarters are located in Yoqne’am, Israel and the company has offices in San Jose, California US, San Paulo, Brazil, Buenos Aires, Argentina, Jakarta, Indonesia and New Delhi, India.

About LATU

LATU is a state owned technical laboratory, whose mission is to foster sustainable development of Uruguay through innovation and transfer of valuable technological solutions. It is a centre of excellence, considered as a national reference by the Uruguayan community and internationally acknowledged by the quality of the services it provides and by its organizational model.

About OLPC

OLPC is a non-profit organization founded by MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte whose mission is to foster the children's innate capacities to learn, share, and create on their own by providing them the XO laptop, a low cost children's machine specifically designed for “learning.”

(Business Wire)

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