I spoke with Peter Benjamin in CapeTown using SkypeOut. Peter has had a long career with ICT in Africa including a great study of S. African telecenters. My cost was 7 cents a minute to call a landline but much more to call a mobile number. The quality of okay and we did not drop during the 30 minutes I was talking . Peter was working with OneWorld Africa and has moved to take over a small non-profit called Cell-Life where mobile phones are being used in the campaign to fight AIDs.
Peter explained that according to the GINI index South Africa is among the most unequal countries in the world in terms of family income; it has more than seven million HIV patients out of 47 million and cell phone penetration of about 80%, so there are interesting opportunities to use this technology in new ways. A pre-paid minute costs about one rand/13c (depending on the calling area) and an SMS message is about half that to 3/4 the cost of one minute.
A service that has attracted affluent teen-agers in South Africa is MXit. It's a mobile instant messaging application that works on various phones with GPRS/3G networks and can connect with the Internet (Google talk and MTN) as well. It's much cheaper than SMS because the charges are by the fraction of a megabyte: anywhere from 50c to 2 Rand per. There must be someone doing a thesis on the service because of its popularity and controversy surrounding a child abduction by an adult last year.
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