How's The Cow?

Ted Rheingold returns from seeing Bruce Sterling speak in San Francisco and points out a comment by Sterling which he finds particularly interesting:

Cell phones are booming biggest in countries where large portions of the populations are still illiterate. Such people are not checking their email or uploading photos, they’re calling to ask if their cow is still alive. There are more cellphones sold in a year than computers on the planet. They are spreading like black ink. Industrialized countries are being leapfrogged. Humanity has never experienced anything with such scope.

Sterling is dead-on (as is often the case) and his comment here points to a fast-growing but often under-appreicated trend - the "digital divide" is being closed not by $100 PCs but by mobile phones, and the spread of cell phones in underdeveloped nations is helping to grow their overall economies. It's no wonder that handset manufactures are flocking to these markets to deliver sub $30 handsets (as Motorola announced they were doing at 3GSM Asia last year.) The GSM Association's Emerging Market Handset program quickly ordered 6M of these for distribution to places like India, South Africa, Nigeria, Bangladesh, and Thailand. Phillips countered that they were working on a sub $15 handset for the same program.

The Economist had an excellent article on this recently, where they pointed to studies that linked mobile phones with growth in developing regions:

Plenty of evidence suggests that the mobile phone is the technology with the greatest impact on development. A new paper finds that mobile phones raise long-term growth rates, that their impact is twice as big in developing nations as in developed ones, and that an extra ten phones per 100 people in a typical developing country increases GDP growth by 0.6 percentage points.

And when it comes to mobile phones, there is no need for intervention or funding from the UN: even the world's poorest people are already rushing to embrace mobile phones, because their economic benefits are so apparent. Mobile phones do not rely on a permanent electricity supply and can be used by people who cannot read or write.

No longer do people need to walk for 20 miles to look for work, order merchandize, check in on their families, or on the heath of their cow - now they can simply call or sms, and the overall efficiencies gained are tremendous.

Still, with hyper-growth there are issues. The high rate of handset distribution in regions like Kenya, for example, can outpace the growth of base stations and electricity to supply them with power, according to this article in the BBC. This leads to people walking miles to the nearest town to charge their devices, or climbing trees to get reception good enough to make phone calls. This in turn, according to Ugandan humorist Joachim Buwembo can lead to something he coined as "Nebrols": (via textually.org)

So there were parts of rural Uganda in which there were plenty of elderly men and women with mobile phones, but where the network signal was so weak that the only way to make a phone call was to climb up a tree on some nearby hill, and make your call while clinging to its branches.

When old people begin to climb tall trees there is bound to be a sudden increase in falls and broken bones.

Hence the epidemic of Nebrols - an acronym for the Network Broken Limbs Syndrome.

He may be kidding about Nebrols but the rapid spread to under developed nations is no joke. Expect this to continue to be one of the biggest growth markets for global operators and handset manufactures in the coming years. And expect it to continue to change the world one cell phone at a time.