This week, Cuba announced that it would allow ordinary citizens to own mobile phones - previously only officials and foreign workers were allowed them.
This has resulted in what must be one of the lowest penetrations in the world, with a mere 1.7% of the population owning a phone, or about 200,000 handsets. I can also tell from AdMob’s stats that Cuba has an incredibly low usage of the mobile web currently, amounting to about 0.04 pages per month per handset. By comparison, the US has 140 times as much use.
While it’s great to welcome Cuba into the 21st century, it got me wondering - are there any other countries where mobile are actually banned still? I assume there must be, as it’s probably the greatest tool for democracy since the written word. So there must be some repressive regimes who outlaw them.
Anyone know the answer?
There’s one thing I haven’t understood about this. Where did the towers come from?
It would seem trivially easy for the government to ban mobiles by not allowing cellsites. They are hard to hide. And if they have them… who gets a phone?
I presume, with non-zero penetration, that mobiles are not banned, but highly restricted, mostly or entirely to government workers. Anyone know what the network is, and who installed it? Who is the carrier? More than one?
Also, with a tiny, restricted user base especially, how does anyone smuggle a useful device into the network? The device is not the issue. You still need to be provisioned /on the network/ so I don’t understand this part either.
Too much information missing.
I presume North Korea, Burma and some other whacked-out isolationist places have no mobile service also. Or, maybe, very little like this. But I have never seen a comprehensive list of them.
Steven
If “officials and foreign workers were allowed them”, they must have cell towers and a network - it’s actually Cubacell. So it’s actually owning a handset that was previously banned.
Russell
Definitely learned something new today… that honestly baffles me (as I couldn’t live w/o my mobile). Will be interesting to see how many people begin to use mobiles, their frequency of use, etc.