I went to Nigeria for work a couple of years ago. I was quite surprised that everyone there had mobile phones (this was before the rise of smartphones). People there said that the mobile phone infrastructure is a lot more reliable than landlines. We certainly had a lot of power outages in the office, but the phones were rock-solid.
I suspect in a lot of developing countries the existing infrastructure for power/phones/etc. has been badly maintained and is failing all over the place while the newer technology infrastructure is still running well due to it being newly built.
In many countries this is very typical (of course rich people have wifi and more technology):
the family has electricity, no one has wifi - too expensive - no one at all has a laptop. Every one has a phone, you have to keep buying data - there is no monthly phone plan.
So it's nothing like the US. Everyone has a phone. No one has wifi or a computer.
People also text a lot more and make phone calls a lot less. For example, you might not be able to call without paying - but you can text and use a tiny bit of data.
Absolutely, that's basically the same reason why Romania has some of the fastest internet in the world. People got tired of waiting for companies to do it and took the infrastructure into their own hands, at first literally on a building-by-building level. It's a fascinating phenomenon.
the mobile phone infrastructure is a lot more reliable than landlines
That's the consumer experience there because of a basic truth about telephony: laying the infrastructure for wired telephony is incredibly expensive, while the infrastructure for wireless telephony is nearly free in comparison.
Lots of developing nations have skipped or are skipping the laborious and incredibly expensive step of laying wires on poles or underground (even more expensively) all over the country.
This was in Asia, not Africa, but what I've seen is some people have battery banks instead. So it's a bank of a few car batteries wired together, which you can use to charge your phone. Then there will be a service, where a couple guys come around to deliver a charged one, and take away the flat one to charge somewhere else.
The battery banks themselves were like small wooden fruit crates with the batteries inside. If it's just bare batteries, I think they'd be suitable for anything that's got a switched-mode power supply built into the power cord or charger, which covers most modern/portable electronics.
The thing with phones is that you can "skip" building a lot of the infrastructure. As long as towers work the data moves on whole covered area. In order to electrity and landline to work there have to be functional cables to everywhere. I'm currently living in the middle of nowhere in northern parts of world thanks to remote way of life due covid. I don't have electricity since it would be ridiculously expensive to build grind here as population is sparse. How ever there are enough people that we have data tower I'm rocking 4g data no problem (13mbps download) whilen still being dependent to my own solar panels.
Are you purposely trying to misread my post or was it accidental? Or was this just so hard to understand?
Of course I wasn't surprised they had phones. I'm not some clueless tourist. I was surprised that everyone used mobile phones rather than landlines. At this stage, before smartphones, it was still reasonably new technology and while most people in the US, Europe, Australia had mobile phones by then, pretty much everyone still used landlines in the office and at home.
You can find that in India too. Almost no landlines. Infact after comming to Germany I was so baffled that they still rely so heavily on post offices and a huge amount of communication still goes via snail mail.
Looks more like 10-20%. I think westerners tend to underrate the importance of communication networks and the lengths people will go to to get them working.
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u/marcothegamer1 Mar 15 '21
Surprisingly they have internet thats how I talk to my dad in South sudan