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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.
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.
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
They're hardly "Enforcing" a monopoly if an Irishman with an MBA can stroll in and sell some phones.
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.
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
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...
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.
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.
And did it occur to you that they might actually have a clearer idea of what might benefit them than you do? Decent, reliable communications are the cornerstone of both civil society and economic growth. They understand that, even if you don't.
[FUCK BETA]
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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