LIRNEasia has developed an innovative diary method to capture the usage patterns of phone among BOP users who don’t own any phone. Dubbed as “Teleuse@BOP3” we surveyed 9,750 sample representatives across India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, the Philippines and Thailand during Q4 of 2008. Our researcher Nirmali Sivapragasam has authored, “The Future of the Public Phone: Findings from a six-country Asian study of telecom use at the BOP” in early 2010. Nirmali went for higher studies to Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University in Singapore. There, with a fellow student Juhee Kang, Nirmali further enriched her aforementioned study in 2011.
I have always been interested in why people refuse convenient technologies that most of us take for granted. I recall visiting Amish country in Pennsylvania with a friend, Diane Zimmerman, who had written a book on their refusal to use the phone within their homes. Now the NYT has done an interesting piece on those whose refuse to use mobiles. Given our teleuse@BOP work, I found this piece about what is likely to tip a non-owner into ownership quite interesting. It is the “crisis.
LIRNEasia is on record supporting tariff forbearance, another word for deregulation. But that does not mean that we support it in all circumstances. The key is that consumers have a choice of suppliers. For that to happen, there must be multiple suppliers. In places such as airports the owner of the building/space usually concessions out the payphones, partly to make his life simple and partly to generate revenue.