mobile « Many Possibilities

Fair Mobile Report from South America

By Steve Song, on April 8th, 2010

The South American research network, DIRSI, have just published a report entitled “Tariffs and affordability gap of mobile telephony services in Latin America and the Caribbean” which profiles mobile affordability in Latin America and the Caribbean. In this post I contrast their approach with my own fledgling work on a Fair Mobile index for Africa. [...] [...]

Why SMS in Africa?

By Steve Song, on February 3rd, 2010

Erik Hersman recently tweeted “I’d like to hear more on whether we should build SMS or internet services in Africa?” This had the serendipitous effect of breaking a bit of a blogger’s block for me. I think most would agree that the answer is not either/or but a mix of the two. That being the [...] [...]

Fair Mobile - Some data

By Steve Song, on November 9th, 2009

Here is a first stab at putting together an index that relates the cost of mobile services to income at the bottom of the pyramid in Africa. I found some ILO data on minimum wage that covers 24 African countries and a I found a couple more by googling. Here are the assumptions that I’ve [...] [...]