The use of low-cost cell phones has increased sharply in Africa, due to their ability to provide cheap communication in areas that were never wired for land-based phones. Where land-based phones were available, they were often too expensive to use because of heavy tariffs and high maintenance cots. The advantages of cell phone use, though still subject to tariffs, have caused an incipient industry to explode in the past decade,

An industry that barely existed 10 years ago is now worth $25 billion, he says. Prepaid air minutes are the preferred means of usage and have created their own $2 billion-a-year industry of small-time vendors. Air minutes have even become a form of currency, transactable from phone to phone by text message.

Read the article, which details unique African applications of mobile phone technology, such as the use of GPS to track elephants.

Visit MobileAfrica, a news magazine that runs stories on cell phone developments in Africa.