Box 14 : Key Elements of Total Cost of Ownership and Use
In short, a successful power solution must be both cost effective in terms of initial investment and recurrent expenses and robust. Cost-effective power solutions involve a combination of judicious selection of energy-efficient equipment to limit energy requirements in the first place and a reliable energy supply, based either on a combination of alternative energy sources, such as solar energy and energy storage systems (batteries), or on a combination of grid electricity and batteries.
Anyone interested in setting up anywhere between one and 5,000 telecenters, whether or not the electricity supply is a challenge, will benefit from using existing decision-making support tools, such as the Powering ICT toolkit, if only to get a sense of how to minimize electricity costs, which tend to be a significant component of total cost of ownership (TCO). A list of the issues normally encountered in a TCO analysis is included in Box 14.6.4. Computing Devices
The birth of the modern information society is usually traced to the beginnings of “personal computing,” with the emergence of the first affordable, mass market desktop computers in the 1980s. Obviously, many of the enabling factors—the development of mainframe computers and their adoption by business, the initial work on networking computers together, the development of chip production technology, and the focus on user interface design—began far in advance of that, but we can trace the real tipping point to the availability of affordable, stand-alone computers. The subsequent decades have seen a dizzying pace of development of new hardware, and with it new applications that took advantage of each step forward in capability. The personal computer has matured into a broadly capable machine, useful for both computing and communications. It is the most capable tool in the toolbox, but it is not the only one.
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