Myanmar: Community Payphone Operator

About a decade ago satellite-powered community payphones exploded in popularity throughout Africa. The continent’s virtually non-existent civilian landline infrastructure cried out for wireless- and satellite-powered innovation to bring telephony to huge populations that lacked such service. Companies like Tellumat, MTN, and Remkor Technologies brought GSM-powered mobile phone booths to countries like Benin, Uganda, Rwanda, and Senegal. Tellumat had at one point sold 30,000 such devices in Ghana. By April, 2010, MTN had installed some 11,000 community payphones throughout Africa. Momentum seems to have shifted. Today it is difficult to get a sense if anything new or forward-looking is happening in the realm of Africa’s community payphones. Virtually no mention of community payphones is to be found on the companies’ respective web sites.

Myanmar joins those African countries on an ever-shortening list of nations which still have community telephone and payphone operators. Change, however, may finally come to displace this relic of Myanmar’s telephonic landscape. Even in relatively underdeveloped countries cell phones are becoming commonplace, eliminating a need for any telephone butler.

This brief film from Google Glass Diaries, Directed by Josh Kim and produced by Lamin Oo and Lin Sun Oo, briefly profiles Shwe Thint Yi, a Myanmarian woman operating a community pay phone in Yangon.

“She used to do brisk business charging people on the street to use her telephone, but in the past 2-3 years she’s seen a sharp decline in customers. She is currently looking for a new job.”