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Bringing Cell Phones To the Third World
An anonymous reader tips a story about Denis O'Brien, a mobile phone entrepreneur whose goal is to spread cell phones throughout third-world countries. Quoting:
"...O'Brien keeps pouring money into the world's poorest, most violent countries. His bet: Give phones to the masses and they'll fight your enemies for you. ...In Trinidad & Tobago, where the state mobile phone firm was dragging its feet on connecting Digicel calls to its own customers, O'Brien harangued government officials to speed things up, even phoning one Christmas night to complain. After the launch the state firm started dropping Digicel calls anyway, making its new competitor look bad. O'Brien took his case to the people, taking out ads in T&T's papers listing life 'Before Digicel' and 'After Digicel' and held a press conference. The state firm eventually relented. In its first four months Digicel bagged 600,000 customers and is narrowing the gap now with the state in market share."
His bet: Give phones to the masses and they'll fight your enemies for you
I'm not sure I understand this. Do these phones shoot lasers or something?
I'm a big tall mofo.
Cause that's what they need...cell phones. Nevermind the maniacs running those countries...
Good communication can help struggling economies a lot. I'm not familiar with Trinidad & Tobego, but in Africa, cell phones are quite popular.
If you don't like Michael O'Leary you definitely won't like O'Brien
The Caribbean operations backing his bonds just announced US$505 million in operating profit (earnings before interest, taxes and depreciation), double the year-earlier figure, on US$1.6 billion in revenue for the year ended in March.
And if you subtract the interest, is the company still making a profit? Red flag: mentioning Operating profit as opposed to profit.
Another red flag: In April O'Brien was in the midst of a five-day, four-country visit (via his Gulfstream G550) to keep tabs on his assets.
Interesting. A private jet.
He's in poverty stricken countries. He's grabbing lots of market share as fast as he can with dubious earnings potential (what? will he take a chicken as payment if these poverty stricken folks can't pay?). He's doing all of this with other people's money.
Does that sound like another business plan we've heard of? Maybe 7 or 8 years ago?
The summary makes it out as though he's some kind of philanthropist giving away free phones because of some kind of altruistic motive. But from the article we see:
"O'Brien has built a US$2.2-billion personal fortune by dominating the mobile business in a dozen poverty-stricken countries (in all, he's in 27 countries and territories)".
So we have another non-story. The story could be called "Someone else making billions of dollars by tapping into new markets". Even without getting into lengthy debates about the nature and ethics surrounding the modern economic system, it's really drawing a long bow trying to portray this guy as a defender of the third world. Not only because he's only giving them cell phones for god's sake, not like it's medicine or anything, but he's making billions of dollars out of it as well.
It's easier to get a damn cell phone than it is to get clean water.
What?
Cause that's what they need...cell phones. Nevermind the maniacs running those countries...
The fact that cells are routinely disabled in areas where heads of state make public appearances is evidence that enabling communication between regular people is a threat to the people who run/own a country.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
419 text messages on our cellphones...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
I think we often see these things as a modern luxury and forget the actual utility they can provide.
I remember an example given by Muhammad Yunus in Banker to the Poor where a woman used to waste a day walking to the next village to pick up some raw materials, only to find out when she got there that they weren't ready yet. A whole days productivity wasted because she had no way of knowing without actually going to check. A cell phone (shared by the village) changed that.
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Yes, in Africa and large parts of Asian mobile phone networks are not only popular, they are frequently more widespread than the good ol' telephonbe net. It is apparently easier to cover a remote area with a GSM infrastructure and to maintain the facilities than with telephone cables.
I know several remote villages in India, were you can make a mobile phone call (at least after climbing on a small hill), but the villages have neither phone connections nor electricity nor sanitary equipment.
"Hannibal's plans never work right. They just work." Amy/A-Team
From the article, it appears he is going into areas where governments enforce a stagnant one-size-fits-all monopoly on communications, and then he offers competition in the form of better coverage, lower prices, and respect for the customer. Unsurprisingly, people are responding in droves.
As for the tangent topic that he is making money, heaven forbid. If you rob people, then that is bad, but if provide a good or service that people appreciate, and then they show their appreciation by paying you, then that is good.
OK, this guy is more aggressive in expanding and in taking on incumbent operators, and he is more focused on small markets. That is all really forced on him by being smaller than the big operators (so he cannot go in to big markets, which would mean higher capex and competing head on with the big boys). Those smaller markets are less competitive and require different tactics.
...the developing countries, too. And then we'll have phone crazies all over the world.
Next thing, we'll have to be scrawling KASHWAK=NO-FO on walls around the world...
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One guy I know immigrated to the US from South Africa. He was shocked that cell phones were seen as a luxury in the US. The reason, he discovered, was that in the US, the land line telephone system in the US works for 99.999% (or something like that) of the time. Where as, in South Africa, the odds were that the land line was not working. Cell phones were the only reliable form of communication.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Or farmers can call a couple of different markets to see what price their crops will fetch instead of just picking one and hope it works out...
There was a post here in a similar discussion a few months back, some guy who had lived in the 3rd world in the Peace Corps gave a few reasons he'd rather have a cell phone than running water.
Cellphones are extremely wide spread and popular throughout Africa already, this should not be a concern.
Canada ranks last in cellular technology among OECD countries (ie, the "western world"), with the highest prices for voice calls and data.
Libya has a better cell phone network than Canada does. Yes, Libya.
Even the CEO of Research in Motion, maker of the blackberry (which is a Canadian company), has said many times that Canada's cell phone networks are holding back progress.
Why, you ask? That's because Canada has an oligopoly of three large cell phone companies with very little competition between them. Further, foreign companies are barred from the Canadian telecom market.
The Canadian government, in its wisdom, has decided that it is better for Canadians to be screwed by Canadian companies than to be charged a reasonable amount by a foreign company.
The introduction of cheap cell phones kills any incentive for the government to push any landlines (or upgrade those already existing) outside of the main cities. Without landlines, there's no internet. A good example is is Bali, Indonesia. Bali is one of the most advanced (and richest areas of Indonesia) and yet in many areas just 3 miles outside of the main cities there are no landlines and no internet. There's also very, very spotty cell coverage. If say, you have a small guesthouse or crafts company, there's no way you can advertise or communicate with your customers.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
But why pick on one company as though it is something special?
The article is binspam. An advertisement. I'm surprised the editors didn't notice. Overwhelmed by the glittery "high tech", I guess.
What?
I'm an expat living in Rwanda right now and I can tell you that mobile phone usage here and in most other African countries is already well established.
Point. It'd be better to distribute a means of communication which didn't rely on easily-disabled infrastructure. Even making every cellphone a satellite uplink just means that the ability to disable/filter/edit calls has been handed to whoever owns the satellites. Now if they used some kind of long-distance point-to-point grid networking...
I've done extensive work on cellular delivery in some of the world's poorest places - Niger, CAR and Guinnea Bissau. In all of them, I found that people would pay whatever it took to have a cell phone, even if that meant no medicine for the kids or no shoes to walk to school in.
I quit because it made me so sad.
That's just great The world needs starving folks to be running around yacking on there phones. That'll really encourage us to feed them. NOT.
Asses are for crapping, not screwing.
One of the problems in developing countries is copper theft - if you have a guy rolling out a drum of telephone cable then a mile down the road there's another guy rolling it right back up. Cell towers tend to be extremely well fixed down and have big scary fences and stuff around them. They don't get stolen. Copper wire does.
*I* was shocked to discover that cell phones were seen as a luxury in the US, and I come from the UK! I'm about the only person I know younger than retirement age that has a landline phone (not that it's used very often) that *isn't* just there because you get it free with ADSL. That said, I have a working PDP11/73 and my daily driver is a 1981 Citroen CX - I thrive on anachronism.
A question for you, then my anecdote. How was the reliability of the land-line phone system in the UK compared to the US?
I'm under 30, and I keep a land line around, as well as the cell phone. The main reason is that to date, the land line has always been available, especially when the power is out. I don't have long distance on the land line (that is what the cell phone is for), but I keep it around basically for emergencies. It's one reason I dislike the Vonage VoIP commercials. I don't think people realize how good of a phone system AT&T built. If the power goes out, I'll lose VoIP and internet but I'll still be able to use my land line. I also have an early '80s phone that has Ma Bell stamped on the bottom of it, so it doesn't have a problem with no electricity, so long as the phone lines work.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
"I'm not sure I understand this. Do these phones shoot lasers or something?"
No. Just exploding batteries.
All the illegal immigrants heading to Malta from Libya are armed with satellite phones anyway. They call Rome when they're about 70 miles south to get picked up by the local aquatic taxi service.
Sounds like they're all doing fine without outside help.
Posting as AC to avoid the Thought Police.
Landlines are extremely reliable in the UK and most of Europe.
Pretty much everyone in Europe has a mobile (cell) phone. My 65+ year old parents both own one. I think a big difference is that you don't pay to receive calls. You can buy a cheap ($30?) phone on a pre-pay tariff and it costs you almost nothing to run as long as you don't make too many calls.
If we give cellphones for places like Trinaded, we should get back some Coconuts... :)
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That's mainly because the North American phone monopolies were very good at getting new service connected up within a few days. I've heard stories from friends in England during the 80s that it could take 2 weeks for BT to get you a landline, often times longer in France. AT&T/Bell would have one up in 3-5 days. Is it any wonder mobile adoption took off in Europe?!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
This guy went in where others did not dare...
That is the difference. Sticking your neck out when you could settle for a comfy life.
That is special.
The "Big ones" did not bother with crushing the competition.
How does the cost of the cell phone compare to land line? For 'long distance' that is, compared to the phone.
Slight backtrack. Where the cell phone 'used' to be considered a luxury, it is now a common place item or necessity. Times are changing, as the cost has come down.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
How does the cost of the cell phone compare to land line? For 'long distance' that is, compared to the phone.
My cellphone subscription is cheaper than my landline subscription, but I do pay a lot more for international calls, unfortunately. More expensive subscriptions may make international calls closer to the price of land lines.
Ofcourse if you want cheap international calls, VoIP is the way to go.
Slight backtrack. Where the cell phone 'used' to be considered a luxury, it is now a common place item or necessity. Times are changing, as the cost has come down.
Nowadays it's the landline that's a luxury.
Libya is a flat part of the Northen Sahara, a fair bit of oil wealth and an area of 679,359 sq mi
Canada is a few hills (to put it lightly) and is 3,854,085 sq mi
Wake up dude, Libya isn't the arse end of knowhere.
That's two people - yourself and an AC - that have claimed I am being racist here. What's racist about it?
I've heard stories from friends in England during the 80s that it could take 2 weeks for BT to get you a landline
In a very remote part of Scotland it took us two weeks to get a landline, but that's because they had to actually lay the last mile - there was no copper to the house. A friend of mine has just had his BT line reconnected so he can get ADSL - three days, mostly because the exchange is being worked on right now and they don't want to mess about with the MDF while other people are working on it.
My cellphone subscription is cheaper than my landline subscription, but I do pay a lot more for international calls, unfortunately. More expensive subscriptions may make international calls closer to the price of land lines.
Makes me wonder if part of the reason Cell Phones aren't dominant in the US is that most people have no need to call international then.
Nowadays it's the landline that's a luxury.
Scary, but true.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
It's about the same as a mobile. I've never experienced any serious problems with my landline, except when the whole of Virgin Media services were down for about a day. Lightning whacked their local Head End, so I'm going to call that pretty much excusable.
If there's a power failure, the mobile phone masts (at least, the larger ones) have about as much standby time on battery as a telephone exchange, and most of the major sites have little diesel gennies as well. Out in the sticks, where there's often no mains power, the cell towers run on diesel gennies anyway.
My cellphone subscription is cheaper than my landline subscription, but I do pay a lot more for international calls, unfortunately. More expensive subscriptions may make international calls closer to the price of land lines.
Makes me wonder if part of the reason Cell Phones aren't dominant in the US is that most people have no need to call international then.
I realise I didn't express myself clearly. It's the cellphone where my international calls are more expensive. But that's partly because I have an extremely cheap cellphone subscription.
International calls on land lines are so cheap these days that I don't think cell phones will ever be cheaper. On the other hand, on international cellphone networks I'd expect the real costs for an international call are hardly more expensive than for a local one.
Why not use two-way radios?
Don't give out cellphones to turd world. It is bad enough dealing with smelly indians
No, it means he's generating value.
He may be making it for 20 and selling it for 30 but it may actually have a value of 50 to the buyer.
I just got an SMS from my boss. It probably cost him 30c which is "ridiculous" for such a tiny amount of data.
However the message was about intermittent connectivity problems we're having with payment processor we use. The 30c costs dwarfs what we can lose if the connectivity issues aren't addressed so it's value to us is much more (and that added value continues on to our customers and their customers).
That's a first world example but the same principle applies anywhere.
There is no shame in taking a profit if you are delivering value.
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That's not necessarily the case, though. I use the cheapest of the cheap prepaid mobile services here, and international calls are so cheap (US$1 = RM3.2) I often make them on the mobile phone instead of using a free VoIP service at home.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
I was the Anonymous Coward who pointed Slashdot at this story....
I was more interested in the prices that digicell charges than their business model. They seem to provide a cheaper service than I get here in a 1st world country, despite harsh political and environmental climates not to mention poor infrastructure.
I wasn't trying to say that digicell was the saviour of the third world or that they were good or bad... just that they seem better than what we get in parts of the "1st world"
sincerely,
P.J. McFucktard
raging racist.
What is it with the ACs and baseless racism claims today?
sincerely,
Major Assgoblin
I just put it down to typical AC butthurt because I said that the major problem with telecoms in developing countries is people stealing the copper wire. Usually I browse at +1, so I never see their tears and tantrums. Looks like someone needs a ride in the waaahmbulance.
My problem with you is that you are racist - to the point that I can easily demonstrate it. It's almost like a fun bar trick to make you say something racist.
sincerely,
Fuck You