of baboons sat on a highway guardrail like old men watching the world go by from the front porch of a general store. As I looked beyond the cacophony at the intersection, I saw what looked like a metal shipping container sitting in the dirt. And sure enough, that's what it was (see Figure 6-11)-a shipping container that had been converted into a mobile telephony central office and phone ser- vices store. Vents on the roof hid a microwave link that connected the switching equipment inside the box to a remote office, and hanging on the wall inside were phones that could be used for a fee by those who did not own their own mobiles. This innovation was the result of a challenge put before the wireless players in South Africa. The government handed out spectrum with the following proviso: "We give you this with the expectation that you will cover 70 percent (or so) of your served area within 5 years. If you don't we will come after you with stiff penalties." The licensed providers took this challenge to heart. Many of them farmed out the services deployment to Downloaded from Digital Engineering Library @ McGraw-Hill (www.digitalengineeringlibrary.com) Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved. Any use is subject to the Terms of Use as given at the website. Access Technologies Chapter 6 contractors, who set up little offices like the one in the picture. Within 2 years they covered 90 percent of the served area. Imagine. In Africa, as in so many regions of the world, wireless is the dominant connectivity solution, even though wireline is far more prevalent and far better in terms of quality than it has ever been before in these regions. Yet because the capital and expense costs to deploy wireless are so much lower than with wireline (because there is no need to dig trenches or put up poles), and because wireless now supports satisfactory levels of data applications, mobility has become the access method of choice in many parts of the world. And well it should. Furthermore, because of the high cost