[buyx]

I can recall many, many years ago (20+), reading an article about the future of telephones. The article proposed that many developing nations would never install landlines with full penetration because mobile phones are so much cheaper. This was written in the era when mobile phones were still expensive. That blew me away.

This brings back bad memories, and illustrates the risk of linear thinking: South Africa's black population was denied proper services under apartheid, including telecommunications. In an effort to supposedly right that wrong, the state-owned telecommunications company, Telkom, was given a years-long monopoly on fixed-line telecommunications in return for putting in fixed line connections to black communities. There were reports that an American corporation, SBC, helped write the country's telecoms act after it acquired a minority stake in Telkom.[1][2]

That monopoly set South Africa back many years, and it's only been in the last decade that it began catching up with the rest of the world. Oh, and the copper network has been so badly looted that many/most places now have wireless landlines. And those under-served black people: they all bought cellphones for the same reasons that people in the rest of the world did.

[1] https://twentythirdfloor.co.za/2007/08/27/telkom-sbc-and-a-f... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20070827181955/http://www.busrep...

[throwaway2037]

Very nice follow-up. I didn't know about this story. Thank you to share.