The Cellphone Stripped Bare
Use your cell phone to call a friend's cell phone. Hang up after the first ring. Your telephone number is now registered at the top of your friend's call history log as a missed call and you pay nothing for airtime. Prank call or mere annoyance? In Africa and parts of south Asia, this practice, variously called "beeping," "flashing," or "bipage," is a vital low- or no-cost communication tool.
The key to the beeping phenomenon is the recognition that buried in the features of every standard mobile phone is a free pager. The recipient of a "beep" responds in a predetermined way, usually by calling the "beeper," but the message could just as well mean "I've arrived at the market" or "I'm done, please pick me up." The subtext of a beep is often that the "beepee" is better off (or at least has more airtime to burn) than the "beeper."
African mobile networks are likely the most advanced and well-developed infrastructure on the continent, but the average person doesn't always have the disposable income to be a full-fledged user. Beeping is a way to access the benefits of mobile communication at a lower price point many poorer African consumers can afford. Other favorite strategies for reducing cost are buying only a SIM card and using somebody else's handset to make calls or sharing one phone among many people.
According to Jonathan Donner, a researcher for Microsoft who has documented the beeping phenomenon, as many as a third of all calls that come across mobile networks in Africa are missed calls. In response, some African service providers have attempted to limit or monetize beeping by adding value to the paging function.
Orange Senegal lets customers send a "Call me back" message when their airtime credit drops below ten cents. A Kenyan provider does the same, but limits users to five messages per day. Vodocom DR Congo charges a penny for its service. Presumably, some consumers will choose these services over beeping because they don't have the ambiguity of a simple missed call.
Back in like Ninety-One, paging technology was the cutting edge. Many people (myself included) paid the same monthly airtime bill for a pager that we do now for a PDA equipped with a QWERTY keypad, camera, internet connectivity, and who knows what else. Leave it to the world's most cash-strapped consumers to ferret out the free underlying features of a technology we take for granted.
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