San Jose, Calif. — Wayan Vota lands in Ghana this week to show that nation a Wi-Fi Web access network patched together with wire mesh, plastic bottles and bamboo poles. Ultralow in cost and already serving 200 radio stations and a host of cybercafes in Mali, BottleNet is bound next for western Africa.

"We built antennas with a 3- to 5-kilometer range for less than a dollar," said Vota, who estimates the same gear "would cost $30 to $50 at Best Buy."

Vota is program manager for the nonprofit Geekcorps, a dozen-person arm of the International Executive Service Corps. Geekcorps installs computer networks in developing countries and trains people to use them.

Its work is but one small piece in a growing patchwork quilt of efforts from large and small companies and nonprofit groups — including some veteran personal computer designers. Whether inspired by benevolence or the bottom line, they are all doing their part to wire up the developing world with ultralow-cost computers.

"I think of this as the beginning of an industry," said Lee Felsenstein, who designed the bike-powered Jhai PC for villagers in Laos. The New York Times Magazine called it one of the best ideas of 2002.

The technical underpinnings of this new market will be open-source software, embedded processors, voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) and Wi-Fi, said Felsenstein, better known as the designer of the Osborne 1 PC and a co-founder of the Homebrew Computer Club that helped launch the PC revolution of the 1970s. "There's a vast market here."

Big companies like Advanced Micro Devices Inc. agree. AMD launched its $185 Personal Internet Communicator (PIC) in October, targeting first-time PC buyers in countries like China, India and Russia, where annual incomes may be less than $7,000. "There is a huge number of people — tens of millions — that fall into that category, and there is a nascent movement of large corporations going into this developing market," said another PC pioneer, Bob Marsh, who co-founded Inveneo. The new nonprofit, spun out of the Jhai PC team, will ship its first systems to Uganda by May.

Fewer than one person in 10 on the planet has Net access, AMD estimates, creating a potential market it values at $7.5 billion by 2015.

For PC processor maker Via Technologies Inc. (Taipei, Taiwan), which plans to roll out a line of ultralow-cost systems by June, the developing world holds the promise of real profits.

"We want to make this a sustainable business," said Richard Brown, vice president of marketing for Via. "In two to three years, it will represent huge volumes, but it's hard to forecast now."

Under the code name Terra PC, Via plans to use its existing silicon to launch three classes of systems for service providers and systems integrators in China and India. They include full-fledged PCs with gigahertz processors selling for about $250 without a monitor and two versions of thin-client PCs — "media stations" using flash memory instead of hard drives and "comms stations" that handle basic browsing, VoIP and e-mail tasks for as little as $100 without a monitor. "We think it's too early to define a single system for developing markets as AMD has done with the PIC," Brown said.

AMD launched its PIC, based on a 500-MHz Geode processor, in October with partners in the Caribbean, India and Mexico. AMD hopes to snag two more customers by April.

The PIC road map leads to wireless networking, higher performance and lower-cost systems, including a single-chip processor/core-logic combo, said Dan Shine, director of marketing for AMD's Personal Connectivity Solutions group.

"This year you will see us work toward driving the price down aggressively below $185. We are looking at SoCs [systems-on-chip] as part of our road map," Shine said.

AMD recently signed on to build the processor for a $100 PC spearheaded by Nicholas Negroponte, head of the Media Lab at MIT. A longtime advocate of low-cost PCs for schools in developing countries, Negroponte has also signed Google and is talking with Motorola, News Corp. and Samsung to help design and build budget systems. He hopes to sell them to education ministries in minimum quantities of 1 million.

Negroponte envisions laptops initially using a novel 12-inch-diagonal rear-projected liquid-crystal-on-silicon or digital-micromirror display flat panel with an LED light source. For ruggedness, the machine would use flash, not hard-disk memory. For networking, it would build in support for Wi-Fi meshes and General Packet Radio Service as well as "USB plugs galore."

Taking a more stepwise approach, Hewlett-Packard Co. started a small emerging-markets group about two years ago that recently fielded its first system in South Africa, a custom-designed Linux PC that can handle four simultaneous users. The so-called 441 costs about $1,600, and comes with a modified Linux kernel and 70 open-source educational apps.

"The 441 is our first entry into this space. [At $400 a seat], we are undercutting white-box PC prices with performance that is still good," said Brooke Partridge, director of market and business development. The business unit has about a dozen developers. In India, it's piloting a mobile photo studio for small villages based on an HP camera, port-able printers and a solar power cell.

Startups and nonprofits are attacking the more challenging remote areas of Africa, the Middle East and Asia. "This is my dream job," Geekcorps' Vota said. "I get to talk tech all day, travel to interesting places and be involved in technology development."

Another nonprofit, World Links (Washington), is installing more than 750 laptops in Rwanda that will run on solar power. "Ninety percent of schools there have no electricity, so the only feasible option is solar," said Ray Stuart, technology manager for the group that focuses on training teachers about computers. Most of the several hundred systems World Links installs each year are donated Pentium 2- and 3-class machines costing as little as $75 from professional refurbishers.

Vota agreed that tapping old but reliable systems is the best route. "We are looking for the lowest-maintenance platform around and currently that is standalone Linux boxes," he said.

But Via's Brown warned that such systems are difficult to service because they use differing versions of systems software and are no longer supported by their vendors. Others note that developing countries have special needs driven by the lack of reliable electrical and telephone networks.

"You have to design differently for this market," said Felsenstein. His bike-powered Jhai computer aims to bring not only a basic PC but also VoIP telephony over Wi-Fi to places where no phone service or reliable electricity exists. The original system was based on a 486-equivalent ZF Micro PC104 board in a sealed box with PCMCIA slots for the Wi-Fi transceiver and flash storage cards. The 12-volt system, which runs a Lao-language version of Debian Linux and open-source apps, can be powered by a bicycle generator.

"All the parts were pretty much available off the shelf at relatively low cost," Felsenstein said.

The system was never deployed, however, due to a political snafu with Laotian officials about locating a relay station on a hill that was part of a military installation. The Jhai Foundation hopes to find a new site for the system soon. It also plans to hold separate system tests this month in China and at a Navajo reservation in Arizona.

"We expect to issue a final design by the end of the year," said Lee Thorn, head of the Jhai Foundation, who served aboard a carrier during the Vietnam War and later aided in Laos' redevelopment. "Anyone can make it."