Mobile in Africa

This article in the IHT looks at cellphone use in Africa "the world's fastest-growing cellphone market.From 1999 through 2004,the number of mobile subscribers in Africa jumped to 76.8 million from 7.5 million, an average annual increase of 58 percent".One in 11 Africans are mobile subscribers.Futher it says that "Africans have never been rabid telephone users;even Mongolians have twice as many land lines per person.And, with the majority of Africans living on $2 a day or less,they were supposed to be too poor to justify corporate investments in cellular networks far outside the continent's more prosperous cities and towns.But when African nations began to privatize their telephone monopolies in the mid-1990s,and competitive operators began to sell air time in smaller, cheaper units,cellphone use exploded. Used handsets are readily available for $50 or less in South Africa.It turned out that Africans had never been big phone users because nobody had given them the chance".

[For Africa,a godsend in cellphones]