Comments on: Why cellphone internet is bad for Africa

By: silentcoder

silentcoder — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 16:45:06 +0000

Brenda, I should point out I wasn’t referring to the use of cellphones as a way to get a computer online (e.g. through your laptop) – in fact I’m doing just that right now to type this comment. It is most definitely a technology that has it’s uses. I was referring to the phone as the primary interface to get online with. While cellphones-as-modems have some downsides, they are not in my opinion a bad technology, they can be very useful (if a bit limited).

By: Brenda Zulu

Brenda Zulu — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 11:44:55 +0000

I have used cell phone internet to check what important emails i have recieved which need almost immediate replies.

In all it only works better when i connect the mobile phone to my lap top. The interface of the mobile phone is still very small.

By: silentcoder

silentcoder — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 05:03:55 +0000

Aragon – very much agreed there. Somebody asked me on facebook and I answered there but I’ll state it here as well just for clarity. I was not talking about using a cellphone to connect a laptop or a notebook to the net. I was talking about connections from the phones themselves. Mobile connectivity is a very good thing, mobile-phone-internet is not nearly as good.
I also didn’t mean it has no advantage to the consumer, but that the true power of the internet is simply not available through it – what it is, is useful but it isn’t and cannot be deemed a replacement for the kind of upliftment where ultimately everybody has access to the true power of the net.

Rob: as for MXIT, that proves my point rather than yours. The only feature it offers that is actually useful to most people is an IM system. The rest is premium rate stuff. The IM system has one thing going for it – it works cheaper than SMS (then again, sending images to the hubble space telescope is byte-for-byte cheaper than sending an SMS). But IM is just one thing the internet allows – and IM from a phone is by definition limited in practise because you can only type realy…sloooooowly on it.
I had mxit for years, I logged in twice, and never used it… recently they released their pidgin plugin, now I use it… from my computer. I even made a port of the plugin available in the kongoni tree for others.
Lets see here… what use do I get out of mxit… I use it so I can IM from my computer to people who don’t have computers… yep, that’s pretty much it.

Ultimately, netbooks (real netbooks, not the mini-laptops that are now trying to be netbooks) with built in 3G modems will be a much better solution to the digital divide. Slow and not big on storage – but they are easy to carry, have long battery life, real screens and real keyboards and are as fully programmable as any other real computer – while not costing much more than the top-range cellphones.

In the end, both the software and hardware on cellphones are so extremely restricted (nothing happens that somebody, somewhere, isn’t getting rich out of) that what you get on them isn’t the internet. It’s a small amount of basic features that happen to use the internet, the internet – that world-changing link-between-all-people-that-gives-everyone-a-voice doesn’t exist on cellphones. Cellphones don’t give you a voice online… they merely allow you to listen to a highlights package, one that was put together with one goal and one goal only: to make you spend money.

By: Aragon

Aragon — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 22:29:13 +0000

I don’t think anyone is trying to discredit mobile internet for what it is, but let’s be logical here – who does mobile internet benefit most? Yes, it benefits the consumer to some degree, but on its own I agree with SC that it benefits the wealthy corporations more. Internet on a cellphone is a convenient augmentation to desktop based internet, but without desktop based internet it keeps the consumer in a restricted play pen where he/she can mostly just consume, and it is the wealthy corporations that benefit from this consumption the greatest. Sure you get MXit, but pretty much everything on MXit has a price tag and by design there’s only so much freedom one has there. With mobile internet you miss out on the vast power that the internet is – global, open, free collaboration. MXit doesn’t let you publish your ideas to the world. Mobile internet can NOT be used for any kind of useful research or learning. I’m not saying mobile internet is a waste of time, I’m just saying (much) more focus needs to be put into uplifting everyone to the point where their mobile internet is a convenient augmentation to their desktop based internet.

By: rob allen

rob allen — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 12:18:06 +0000

Unbalanced –
mobile internet isn’t the Desktop Based Internet – correct
Desktop based internet can do more than mobile internet – correct
Therefore Mobile internet is bad for africa?? – incorrect (doesn’t not follow)
Cellular internet remains almost entirely a one-way thing?? – Mxit???

Here’s a few of the info points you ignored
Mobile Internet can do much more than no Internet (or just SMS)
Mobile Internet can create huge number of opportunities/benefits in developing countries (there are many examples – just look at mobileactive.org)
African mobile data bandwidth costs are among the lowest in the world (and many african counries allow fairly low out of bundle costs)

So like most things you can look at it both ways – I believe cellphone based internet has a great potential value to society but I’ll agree that mobile internet isn’t .. (the desktop based internet)

By: silentcoder

silentcoder — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 10:11:57 +0000

@Daniel, I take it your comment was supposed to be rather longer ? Since you didn’t actually say what your opinions are …

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By: Daniel

Daniel — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 10:10:16 +0000

While I respect that this is what you think, your opinion – and obviously you’re entitled to your opinion – I completely disagree with almost all of it.

I am sure that you’ll probably disagree with my opinions in turn. And that’s all well and good. People differ. Life goes on.

However, although you might not *like* mobile Internet in it’s current form, nevertheless mobile Internet is.

By: MastaP

MastaP — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 06:36:05 +0000

This post sums up everything I experienced back home. The sad part is that the situation has grown on people so much that they consider it normal. I am having a hard time maintaining a blog about African music industry just because people there won’t post news. On the contrary, they expect me to put online media content (music, videos) that was produced there going as far as sending them to me in Europe by plane for me to upload them. Sad sad situation.

By: silentcoder

silentcoder — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 04:56:24 +0000

@Aragon it’s true about South Africa, we have an extremely high tax rate and in theory we have a fairly socialist economic system with free healthcare and many public services paid out of tax-money – so that those who cannot afford them as individuals are subsidized by those who can afford them a thousand times over.
Sorry to those among my American readers who just got a horrified look on your faces, but you are the only country in the entire world where that would not be deemed a good thing.
In South Africa, our biggest problem lies with service delivery – we’re not living up to the planning. We collect the taxes but then we waste it. In the meantime, the housing for the poor isn’t built. The free healthcare is of such low quality that it’s useless. We outsourced our bus-services in Cape Town and last year – we didn’t pay the bus company, which then stopped running for three weeks – causing massive harm to the entire local economy.

I think the continuing denial of the government about this problem; their continuing pretense that the protests about service delivery is somehow anything other than a message from the people to their elected officials to do their jobs… it’s going to cause very serious problems in the near future.

But I wasn’t really thinking about South Africa in this post, we still have a fairly large contingent of computer internet users and as our economy grows that number rises with it. In the rest of Africa, the vast majority of people have either never been online or if they have – it was from a phone. So while I’m not ignorant of our many other challenges, I was just addressing a particular one because the current most popular solution to it is a complete sham.

In South Africa our picture is a little different and it will still take some time to see what will really emerge. This is partly why we’re the only African country with some copyright-lobbying going on, we actually have enough people using the internet for the corporations to worry.