Brasilien arbeitet am 'Computer für Alle'

In a basic level, universal access means granting every citizen access to telecomunnication services; specially, universal access to the Internet, what implies on the world wide web access. This becomes a challenge due to nowadays social differences - usually related to as Digital Divide - particularly in countries under development proccess such as Brazil, where expenses associated with Internet access makes it unaccessable by a large slice of the population and even many public institutions. Besides this obstacle, most of these services are avaiable only in big urban centers. This universal access demands three basic elements: physic access to the network; the existence of peers in a large scale through which the access is made an the information of citizens's interest avaiable for access. This disposal of information in the web is an important matter that has been dragging government concerns, who develops projetcs in this area of interest, and the society as a hole. Certainly, this process will be considerably sped up due to the raising number of people accessing the network. For the access peers to be avaiable in a large scale, it is absolutely necessary for the solutions adopted to be unexpensive and of easy operation since the goal is to provide every citizen the access, in despite of the society segment this one makes part of. Although, the devices should present a performance suitable to the performance demanded for the visualization of the several types of content avaiable in the world wide web nowadays, in order to provide absolute access to these contents. To make sure physic access is possible it is necessary to be provided with a network infra-structure that makes the access possible from all over the country, being it through dial-up connections or access lines put in public institutions such as schools and libraries. Related ot the subject of infra-structure is the installation of servers and other network devices that make good the operation conditions of all the access equipment, once one of the best ways to keep the equipment cost at lower prices is to transfer part of the usual processing tasks to specialized servers. Through this, LUAR Laboratory has been working on the development of low cost computers with simple operation interfaces and also on the servers made necessary for its implantation, as well as evaluating matters of interconnection networks (infra-structure) directly related to the problem. The UFMG Computer Science Department Universalization of Internet Access Laboratory (LUAR) studies the several solutions to wide, pratical and cheap access to all the resources avaiable through the world wide web. The solutions developed by LUAR are concerned about hardware aspects, filtering the most adequate thecnologies, as well sa softwares aspects, that come up with satisfatory performance. The development proccess of LUAR solutions gets started on the analisis of the soluiton, reaching prototypes implementation, test laboratories and evaluation o the impact on installed networks infra-structures, looking forward to demonstrate the eficience of these solutions on the target environments.

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