The spread of the mobile phone across even the poorest parts of Africa has to be one of the most astonishing _ and least predicted _ tech phenomena in recent years. People had always talked about putting up telephone poles, and bringing electricity and the internet to the hinterland, but mobiles? They weren't even part of the conversation.
Now, though, it seems that people in Kenya and the rest of Africa are just like folks everywhere else. They want mobiles (and, by the look of it, they want Nokias). Even the cheapest, most rudimentary handsets can retrieve daily prices for maize or cattle, get exchange rates, and function as mini-ATMs.
The fact that people are overwhelmingly poor has forced mobile phone companies to operate in ways that ought to set an example for the mega-providers in the western world. The New York Times had a story recently about how pay-as-you-go phones are slowly catching on in the US. Such things are written about with a strange sense of novelty: You buy $100 in phone credit, and punch it into your phone, and then you call!
For Americans, who have simply gotten used to being roped into punitive contracts and being forced to buy a limited range of phones from their provider of choice, this is a novelty. That says a lot about the anti-competitive practices of phone companies, which seem to believe that the best way to make money is to pretend to give you a whole array of choices and force you to sign a contract that is almost always beneficial only to them. Either you pay a set fee and don't use up the minutes you're allotted, or you exceed your minute limit and get crushed with surcharges.
In Africa, you but a SIM card for about three dollars from your preferred operator, and plug it into your phone, which is bought straight from a Nokia store or a dealer selling all sorts. Then you begin filling it with airtime. Kenyans do this is increments as low as 10 or 20 shillings _ just a few cents.
It's a good thing that pay-as-you-go phones are making inroads, but they are still an absolute scam. First, you don't buy a sim card -- you have to buy a phone belonging to a particular plan, and the phones are almost always complete crap. Then, the pricing is outrageous. Twenty cents a minute or something, plus a charge of a dollar for every day you use the phone. Insane.
On one vacation home a while ago, we bought two pay-as-you-go phones. After a couple of weeks, about $50 in credit remained on one phone, while the other was dry. I went to Radio Shack and asked the clerk if it was possible to transfer credit from one phone to another, as you can do in Kenya with a few quick clicks. He looked at me as if I'd tattooed "Fuck You" across my forehead. It was simply impossible.
Compare that to the freedom of phone usage in Africa. If you don't like one company, you buy the sim card of another and plunk it into the phone of your choice.
