“ [N]early half of all [Australian] households use mobile phones instead of fixed-line phones as their main voice communication.
—
- the quotation above’s from here
- now, that’s not because a reliable fixed-line infrastructure doesn’t exist; as you’d expect in a country like Australia, generally speaking, it does
- nor is it because households can’t afford to pay to access the fixed-line infrastructure; as you’d expect in a country like Australia, generally speaking, they can
- it’s simply a case of people having the luxury of choice and exercising it in favour of mobile phones, no doubt because of their convenience
- contrast the Australian situation with that in India, where, as you’d expect, a reliable fixed-line infrastructure is not as generally available
- naturally, that fact of itself would tend to encourage the creation of a mobile phone infrastructure and it has: see here
- but what about people’s ability to pay for access to, particularly, that mobile phone infrastructure?
- well, at almost the same time as he saw the story about Australia from which he quoted above, he saw this interesting story dealing with, among other things, telecommunications in India
- the story concentrates on Dharavi, a slum in Mumbai that’s the largest in Asia; it has over 1M people in a single square mile
- according to the story:
- so the fact that used mobile telephones are bought and sold is a factor that helps to bring the cost of accessing the mobile phone infrastructure within the reach even of the residents of Dharavi
- it seems, incidentally, that, in India, there’s a “huge demand” for used consumer durables of all kinds, not only mobile phones
- however, it’s said that the market for used consumer durables other than mobile phones is “extremely inefficient”
- the story refers to an attempt to leverage the high penetration of mobile phones into a mechanism for trading used consumer durables other than mobile phones
- the story’s worth reading in its entirety
- the image above of a woman using a candlestick phone in about 1910 is from here
- (incidentally, do you think that if she held the receiver to her right ear, the hair on that side of her head would stand out similarly?)