1st World America is falling 3rd World Africa.
Uh, Africa has three times the population of North America, and lacks North America’s ubiquitous phone line infrastructure.
Cell phones also help Africans avoid interference from their corrupt governments. Let’s hear it for freedom and innovation!
And they’re just talking about feature i.e. “dumb” phones right now. A couple of more years, and they’ll have smartphones, and that will really open up the possibilities.
Places like this are where cell phones were first deployed.
They have no traditional infrastructure.
The development of cell phone use in Africa and the Middle East is spectacular. It was one of the factors in the “Arab Spring”. I think I read a statistic that cell phone ownership in the Muslim countries ranged from 30 to 70 percent depending on the country.
I Africa I have read of people saving up to buy a cell phone and then renting it out by the minute to people in their village as a regular and growing business. It will be fascinating to see how all this plays out.
What could North America do with 650 million cell phone subscriptions?
pretty common phenom. In B-School they call it the latecomer advantage. Europe/Japan got to rebuild using current tech of post WWII era. They didn’t have to go back to the 19th cent. and start over. Today the third world builds with current tech in the post-national economic system.
Meanwhile we in the USA are using infrastructure/concepts that can be a century old in some cases and wondering why we are having a hard time competing. Consider our rail network vs. Euro/Japan, for example. Or broadband access in US vs. some Asian nations, another example. Or the space program of China.
It’s easier for third worlders to plant a few cell phone towers than to build up a telegraph system, then a land line POTS network and then add cell towers.
We in the west design, invent and create, but it’s difficult and expensive to re-infrastructure an industrial civilization. If you have nothing, you can actually be at an advantage if you choose your investments wisely.
Do they have batteries in them?
What do they call them over there, Odingaphones?
Also, note that in the US there is the legacy land-line system and atm-system and bank branch system
But in Africa they use cell phones for banking, etc. etc. -- no one uses cheques for instance and even credit cards are replaced in some parts of east africa by cell phones.