Spending the past month and a half working in Trinidad has taught me much about the state of technology in emerging markets. I’ve found it particularly interesting that WiMax has rolled out to vast areas untouched by wired broadband. Even in the bank branches where I’ve been working, WiFi is often connected to a 4G backend (though strangely the ethernet does go through wires all the way to the ISP). In the US, we’re at least a year behind in this sweeping 4G penetration that BMobile currently has in Trinidad and Tobago and which seems to support a whole lot of business.
But not everything is so rosy. The smartphones people typically carry are older Blackberries; the money simply isn’t there to fund the expensive Android and iOS handsets that we know and love back in the states. It’s a matter of figuring out what’s cheap and scalable in an era where more technology is available at the time of an initial rollout. It’s interesting to muse about what the US might look like if we hadn’t built our network until five or ten years ago.
