Mobile Phone Versus Land Line

A rancher who raises goats on the mountain ranges of Annapurna in the Himalayas of Nepal always has a stick in one hand and a mobile phone in the other. Alisuk Idlerut, who hunts polar bears at 74 degrees north latitude, Resolut, North Pole, also carries a cell phone with him at all times.

State-of-the-art technologies no longer belong to advanced countries only: remote areas of the world are increasingly adopting them as well.

There was a time when underdeveloped countries lagged far behind their developed counterparts because of the costs of following in the footsteps of advanced neighbors to realize industrialization as well as the IT revolution. Advanced countries speed up the development process based on the technological edge they have been building up.

Due to the development of IT, there has been a prevalent view that the “digital divide” will only widen. However, under-developed countries are using the same sophisticated technologies used in developed countries and are narrowing the technological gap by “leapfrogging” middle stages.

Higher Penetration in Cell Phones Than Landline Phones-

The leapfrog is more pronounced in information and communications technologies (ICTs). In some of the least developed countries (LDCs) in Africa and Asia, cell phone penetration is on the steep increase. In 2006, the penetration of landline phones was 3.2 per 100 people, which was 1.68 times more than in 1996, when it was only 1.9. The cell phone penetration rate, however, increased 108-fold from 0.2 to 21.6 people. A switchboard and phone lines need to be installed in order to establish land line phone infrastructure, which requires funding African governments cannot afford, but it costs relatively less to build cell phone infrastructure. This is the reason why many LDCs are opting for cell phones, not fixed line phones.

India, where land line subscribers number only 50 million even though it has a population of more than 1.1 billion, is seeing the number of new cell phone subscribers exceeding 6 million every month these days. The total number of cell phone subscribers in India was 153.99 million as of September, 2007, which in stark contrast with 339,031 a decade ago.

Advanced Services Including Mobile Payment Systems Are Introduced-

The Internet, a watershed of ICTs, is also being distributed based on the wireless technology model as they cost less to install than wired technologies. For example, NGOs successfully pulled off the “Bush Net Project” in 2000, establishing Internet access and e-mail exchange systems with high-frequency radio. This triggered interest in installing wireless networks instead of networks for cable TV that African countries were working on. As a result, the number of Internet users in Africa jumped 8.7 fold from 2000 to 2006, while the world showed a 2.4-fold increase over the same period.

With the spread of cell phones and wireless Internet, more and more people in Africa are engaged in what has not taken off in advanced countries in earnest: mobile transactions. In Kenya, a mobile payment system, which has been introduced by “M-PESA” this year, has surpassed the 600,000 mark, and more than $38 million has been traded using the system so far. In South Africa, “Phone Damo,” in partnership with Vodacom, has introduced mobile payment services in South Africa and Zambia.

One Hundred Dollar Laptops-

International aid has been a boon to the leapfrogging process. Professor Nicholas Negroponte of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said in 2005, “Let’s distribute 100-dollar laptops to children in poor countries,” and with these remarks, he initiated the “One Laptop per Child” project.

Even though the price for the OLPC laptop is currently $188, much higher than $100, the laptops have already received 350000 orders. This year’s production goal is 300,000, and starting next year, 1 million OPLC laptops will be manufactured every month and distributed to children in developing countries.

jeon@donga.com