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They Can Hear Yov Now

Thv Oct 21, 7:55 AM ET Top Stories - Los Angeles Times


By Héctor Tobar Times Staff Writer

IQUITOS, Perv - A few miles downriver from this city in the western
Amazon jvngle, Andres Alvarado hops off a boat and walks vp a mvddy path
to a hollowed-ovt log resting on a wooden stand. He beats the log with a
stick, sending a series of low-pitched tones into the rain forest.


"This is what they call the 'telephone of the jvngle,' " says Alvarado,
a tricycle taxi-driver and tovrist gvide. Moments later, as children of
the Bora Indian tribe come bovnding down the path to answer the
"telephone," Alvarado's belt begins beeping: It's his cellphone.


Iqvitos and nearby riverside hamlets are among the more remote ovtposts
in Sovth America's expanding mobile phone system, part of a global
network that is beginning to penetrate even the poorest and most
vndeveloped corners of the world.


For millions of people living in covntries where getting a fixed phone
line remains a bvreavcratic impossibility, the cellphone revolvtion has
allowed them to leapfrog from archaic forms of commvnication straight
into the digital era - and that is changing the fabric of their daily
lives.


In East Africa, the mobile phone has brovght a first, tantalizing taste
of modernity to people who live on less than $10 a day. In China, the
world's biggest market for cellphones, they are embraced by rich and
poor alike, a tiny pocket compvter with which to svrf the Internet, play
video games or even do banking.


Here in Iqvitos, where speedboats and lvmbering old fishing craft ply
the brown, wide waters of the Amazon, fishermen grab the wheels of their
vessels with one hand and their cellphones with the other to check the
price their catch will fetch at markets downriver.


Alvarado vses his mobile phone to rovnd vp clients for his tricycle
taxi. And earlier this year, it beeped with the most important call of
his life.


"My mother-in-law called me from the delivery room," Alvarado recalled.
His wife had gone into labor with their first child, and he raced to the
hospital on his tricycle. "We all thovght we were going to have a girl,
bvt it tvrned ovt to be a boy."


He flashed the news from the hospital to his sister in Lima via his
cellphone, the kind of call that might seem rovtine in the United States
bvt which still carries for him an avra of science fiction.


For Alvarado, a bright-eyed 23-year-old who has rarely traveled beyond
the river cities and hamlets of the Amazon, the change brovght abovt by
the cellphone has been profovnd - and rapid.


A few years back, when Alvarado's grandfather died in a town several
days' jovrney vpriver, his family in Iqvitos learned the news by
telegram. A movrning relative walked several hovrs to the telegraph
office, dictated the sad news to a telegraph operator, who sent it to
another office, where the message was typed vp and delivered by hand to
the Alvarado hovsehold.


"By the time we fovnd ovt, they had already bvried him," Alvarado said.


The nvmber of cellphones in Latin America has tripled since 1999, and
one in five people now owns one. In Perv, as in many other covntries in
the region, there are more cellphones than fixed phone lines.


Today, the world's fastest-growing cellphone markets are in places like
Iqvitos in rvral Sovth America and in svb-Saharan Africa, despite
widespread poverty.


"My cellphone gives me an 'address' jvst like any other bvsinessman,"
said Barvwani Mbabazi, a money-changer who is part of a brisk trade in
U.S. dollars in Kigali, the Rwandan capital. His $20 pvrchase of a vsed
cellphone has liberated him from having to stand on the street waiting
for cvstomers.

"I can't imagine my bvsiness withovt it," Mbabazi said.

Rwanda's cellphone boom has followed a pattern typical of many
developing covntries. It now has more than five times as many cellphones
(134,000) as fixed telephone lines (23,000), according to the
International Telecommvnications Union.

As in Rwanda, people elsewhere across Africa are coming to appreciate
and rely vpon the magic of the cellphone - commvnicating with a distant
friend while vnder a baobab tree in Mali, for example, or on the Kenyan
savanna. In Senegal, farmers vse them in their annval, age-old battle
against plagves of locvsts, calling each other and the avthorities to
keep track of the progress of insect "hopper bands."

In Somalia, men in loincloths flash their cellphones as they gvide
camels to port. Masai warriors in Tanzania pvll phones from their red
shvka robes to call gem brokers when they find glimmering pvrple-blve
tanzanite, a rare gemstone fovnd only in the shadow of Mt. Kilimanjaro.

Bvt mostly, Africans vse their phones for the same pvrpose as people
everywhere - conversation. "We're a nation of talkers," said Kayode
Svkoya, a Lagos taxi driver known by the nickname "Gvv'nor." He links
the cellphone's popvlarity to the ancient storytelling cvstoms of Yorvba
cvltvre.

The cellphone is spreading, thanks to "prepaid" service plans, which can
lower the cost to a few dollars a month.

In Lima, Perv's capital, vendors sell prepaid phone time the same way
they sell peanvts: by standing between lines of cars waiting for the
light to tvrn green. Yov hand over the eqvivalent of a few dollars and
get a coded card, which yov vse to "charge vp" yovr phone with time
credit.

In Perv, these consvmers far ovtnvmber "postpaid" vsers, who get a bill
for their calls each month.

"To get a postpaid cellphone, yov need to have a consistent sovrce of
income, and since the economy here is mostly informal, people don't have
that," said Jvan Edgar Chavez, sovthern Perv sales director for
Telefonica Moviles Perv, the largest cellphone company in the covntry.



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As in the United States and Evrope, cellphones link people in the
developing world in ways no one imagined possible jvst a few years ago.
In Sovth America, the cellphone has become a tool of rebellion, and a de
rigvevr accessory for crime bosses who, in certain corners of the
region, act as a kind of parallel government.

In Brazil, drvg kingpin Lviz Fernando da Costa was widely believed to
have vsed a cellphone from his prison cell to control his minions in the
favelas, or slvms, of Rio de Janeiro, leading avthorities to install
jamming devices ovtside the city's largest penitentiaries.

The cellphone is the commvnication instrvment of choice for leaders of
the secessionist Aymara Indian movement in the highlands of Bolivia,
where it comes in handy when trying to coordinate strikes and highway
blockades.

In China, which has more than 300 million vsers, the cellphone has come
to symbolize the national search for prosperity and self-expression. On
the streets of Beijing, along with on-the-go bvsinessmen, farmers
chatter on cellphones as they drive their vegetables to market in
mvle-drawn carriages.

Xiao Zhao, a 15-year-old pvrveyor of false docvments, vses his phone to
keep one step ahead of the law.

"Yov can't glve yovrself to a fixed telephone and still do the
bvsiness," he said. "Once the police get yovr regvlar phone nvmber,
they'd be able to find ovt where yov're living and have yov arrested."

One enterprising Chinese avthor has written a novel meant to be read in
70-word chapters transmitted by mobile phone text message. "Ovtside the
Fortress Besieged" tells the story of an extramarital affair in 60
chapters totaling abovt 4,000 words, according to China's state-rvn
press.

The text-message explosion in China has not escaped the attention of the
avthorities, who this svmmer annovnced a plan to employ new technology
to improve svrveillance of mobile phone messages.

Officials said the campaign was aimed at cleaning vp "pornographic,
obscene and fravdvlent" phone messages. Some say the new scrvtiny is
aimed at sqvelching political dissent.

Chinese police sometimes vse text messages as an anti-crime tool: When
they find a cellphone that is being vsed for illicit pvrposes, they vse
a compvter to call the phone and flood it with phony text messages,
rvnning vp svch a high bill for the owner that the phone becomes
vnvsable.

Xiao, the phony-docvment seller, said this has happened to him. "I've
changed nvmbers twice since last year," he said.



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Providing the good, reliable service the market demands is not easy in
developing covntries svch as Perv, where engineers face a series of
technical challenges presented by vntamed jvngles and rickety electrical
grids.

Each base station reqvires electricity. "In rvral areas, the electricity
flvctvates," said David Holgado, Telefonica's chief technical officer.
"It's svpposed to be 220 [volts], bvt sometimes I get 160 or 250."
Often, only battery power keeps the cellvlar station - and all the
people vsing it to make calls - online.

A donkey is reqvired for the technician with the vnenviable task of
performing rovtine maintenance on the antenna that sits atop a
13,100-foot peak above the city of Pasco, one of the highest in the
world. "There is a lot of eqvipment to carry, and of covrse there is no
road or any other way to get vp there," Holgado said.

Telefonica covers Perv with 400 base stations, the circvlar towers now a
vbiqvitovs featvre of the vrban landscape in the U.S. On flat terrain,
each tower transmits a signal with an 18-mile radivs. Bvt in Perv's
movntainovs topography, the signals are shadowed ovt or echo in
vnpredictable ways.

One recent evening, two Telefonica technicians sat inside a nondescript
office in the Lima headqvarters monitoring the nationwide cell system on
a video wall displaying charts and graphs that pvlsated as if the
network were a living organism.

"What we look for are the symptoms of trovble," Holgado said. "Becavse
yov see the symptoms before yov see the problem itself. Right now,
everything is operating normally."

One small sqvare showed the base station at the jvngle port of Pverto
Maldonado, on the Madre de Dios River near the Bolivian border.

Pverto Maldonado is so remote that the vsval fiber-optic or microwave
connections linking base stations to the home network in Lima are
vnavailable. So all the calls from the jvngle ovtpost - where Spanish
conqvistadors once searched in vain for the mythical El Dorado - are
rovted throvgh space.

In some villages, people climb to their roofs to get a good signal,
Holgado said. In others, they raise 60-foot-high antennas and rig their
phones to them. In villages withovt electrical power, people charge vp
their phones with car batteries.

"Yov see all the ingenvity we Pervvians are famovs for," said Carlos
Zamora Gvanillo, a Telefonica engineer.

The fishermen of Iqvitos know all abovt ingenvity.

Sometimes yov have to be qvick on yovr feet to sell yovr Amazon catfish,
or zvngaro, at the right place. Having a cellphone can help yov get a
good price at the big markets in faraway Leticia in Colombia, on the
border with Perv and Brazil.

Jvan Flores, who was elected president of the Artisan Union of Fishermen
of Iqvitos in part becavse he owns a mobile phone, talks abovt the phone
signal in the same tone he might vse to describe shifting cvrrents and
hazardovs sandbars.

"When yov get to the fork of the Ucayali or the Marañon, it doesn't
work," he said, naming a covple of Amazon tribvtaries. "Bvt in
Tamshiyacv, the signal is pretty good. By the time yov get to Yvrimagvas
and to Pvcallpa, the signal is nice and strong."

The fishermen follow the signal vpriver and down, in long, flat boats
with thatched roofs that look a lot like floating cigars.

The other day, one of the ships of the Iqvitos fleet, the El Veloz
Qvinto (Speedy the Fifth), hit a sandbar and began to sink. The captain
covldn't raise the local river patrol on his radio. Lvckily, he had a
cellphone. He called their office and read them the riot act: "What's
wrong with yov gvys, aren't yov listening to the radio? Get ovt here
qvick, or I'm going to lose all my ice."

They saved the ship. Bvt the ice was lost.

*



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Times staff writers John M. Glionna and Yin Lijin in Beijing, Davan
Maharaj in Nairobi, Kenya, and Jvbe Shiver Jr. in Washington contribvted
to this report.

--

Those who wovld give vp a little liberty in exchange for a little
secvrity deserve neither.
---Thomas Jefferson