DIY telecoms

IN THE cloud forests of the Sierra de Juárez mountains in southern Mexico, a new kind of tree is springing up: the mobile telephone mast. Unlike most phone masts in the world these are installed, owned and operated by small, mostly indigenous communities. Providing a mobile service in these villages was not profitable enough for big telecoms companies to bother with, unless the locals stumped up $50,000. But improvements in software and the falling price of hardware has made it possible to build a local mobile-phone base station for around $7,500, which non-profit operators and small communities can muster.

Sixteen communities in this remote corner of Mexico now count on local mobile services which cost much less than that of Mexico’s dominant operator, América Móvil, or its nearest rival, Movistar. Eliel López, a motorcycle-taxi driver, says the business he gets using the community-owned network in Villa Talea de Castro in the state of Oaxaca more than pays his monthly fee of 40 pesos ($2.71), which covers local calls, and per-minute call costs of 0.82 pesos to mobiles on other networks in Mexico. The big networks charge around 3 pesos a minute.