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Bringing Cell Phones To the Third World
Posted by
Soulskill
on Sat Aug 23, 2008 07:20 AM
from the strength-through-communication dept.
from the strength-through-communication dept.
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."
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Submission: Third world better off than us by Anonymous Coward
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Lethal Phones? (Score:5, Funny)
I'm not sure I understand this. Do these phones shoot lasers or something?
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The pen^h^h^hphone is mightier than the sword^wgun.
Interesting. (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:Interesting. (Score:4, Funny)
7 or 8 years ago? The US Federal Reserve has been around a lot longer than that, I think.
Parent
"Pouring money"? (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Mods: This is not a troll.
I fully agree that there should be no positive light cast on people who are, in the process of filling their own pockets, incidentally trickling benefits down to the people below them.
Brownie points should be given to people who actively try to help others, and perhaps bring themselves a benefit as a side effect. Those are the people who won't turn around and screw the third world the moment it is deemed more profitable.
*cough*
Nike.
*cough*
Stagnant Monopolies vs Investment Capitalist (Score:2)
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 th
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I'll bite - I happen to work for one of the core suppliers for Digicel, and I've been to most of the sites (in both the Caribbean and South Pacific). Yes - he makes billions. Yes, the 3 core technology suppliers (E//, HUA, RKN) make millions each year.
Guess what - the people in those countries are most grateful. You guys talk about Bell monopolies? Have you ever been to a dot of a country in the SP where whole villages share one phone line? Or in the Caribbean where monopolistic government incumbents c
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Is his name L. Bob Rife? Oh wait, its O'Brien..sounds like Rife, though.
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You are an idiot (Score:3, Informative)
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 inte
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You misunderstand. If it takes a person in the developing world, say, 1 day, to harvest their field by hand, and somebody goes around charging them, say, the equivalent of 1/2 days labor to do it with a machine that he has, and it costs him, say, the equivalent of 1/10 of a days labor, where's the problem? He is making a horrible, vicious profit of 2/5 days labor on every field, and the worker is making a horrible, vicious profit of 1/2 days labor.
Profit does not always imply that something hinky is going o
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However the grocery store does not always profit from selling the loaf of bread. This is something you learn in Marketing 101, or having a ton of family members working in all departments of grocery stores.
There are times that you are actually buying things for LESS than it costs the grocer to get them. This is done to draw peopl
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Even though you're paying $4.009 for a gallon of gas, the gas station may be paying $4.01 per-gallon.
They generally make up the loss on bottles of water that cost $1.39 and other things with high profit margins.
Cell phones??? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's easier to get a damn cell [worldbank.org] phone [thestranger.com] than it is to get clean water.
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Insightful?
I don't know about the african picture but the one with the indian women says zilch. You don't see the background so all you have is her traditional cloths, and that is somehow supposed to imply that she doesn't have access to drinking water (or atleast that she is very poor?)
Now, I surely agree that a big chunk of world population is without clean water but are you implying that it is the same population that has trouble finding clear water that is getting cellphones? If yes, I would like proof
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But real needs have no place in the "free" market, do they?
Of course not. We must keep spending what little we can gather on the false needs created by those in power.
now we can get (Score:2)
...and pretty soon the Pulse will hit.... (Score:2)
Next thing, we'll have to be scrawling KASHWAK=NO-FO on walls around the world...
Lack of infrastructure (Score:5, Interesting)
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Without landlines, there's no internet.
With 3G, at least here in Finland, we have internet everywhere. I see no reason why this wouldn't be possible in any country with mobile phone infrastructure. Only the mobile phone operators need to be connected to an Internet backbone, that's all.
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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.
Ummm... I think you've got a seriously false assumption:
that any of those people can afford a computer.
The cellphones these poor people are buying are the simplest handsets possible. Before that cellphone, the highest tech items these people might have owned is a TV, generator, or a radio/cassette.
Internet is worth zero to people who cannot access it.
And you can't subsidize their access with advertising, since the poor can't buy the advertised goods anyway.
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Poorest places in the world (Score:2)
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.
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Re:That's what they need (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Re:That's what they need (Score:5, Informative)
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 [amazon.com] 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.
Parent
Re:That's what they need (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Re:That's what they need (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:That's what they need (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Parent
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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.
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*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.
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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 peop
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?!
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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.
Re:That's what they need (Score:5, Insightful)
Cause that's what they need...cell phones. Nevermind the maniacs running those countries...
The fact that cells are routinely disabled [schneier.com] 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.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)