Himalayan kingdom goes mobile

According to this article, Bhutan is now home to a mobile phone network. The capital city of Thimpu is one of the few places in the country where the network is up and running. While the phones and call prices are cost-prohibitive for most living here, businesspeople and other members of aspiring classes are apparently enthusiastic about the technology. In the words of one shop owner, "In the last few weeks I have seen that people are rushing in for phones. We have had to rush to get more supplies of phones as we had run out of the previous stock that we had calculated. It's beyond everybody's expectations." Some officials quoted in the article worry that the networks cannot handle the demand that the 2,000 subscribers are putting on their new mobile phones.

The author concludes, "Infrastructure or no infrastructure, the fact is that for now the impact of mobile communications will be limited. Life in rural Bhutan, home to most of the population, will remain largely untouched by this leap of technology. Outside the cities life is basic and few people own any kind of phone, relying instead on central communication centres which use microwave links to direct traffic around the country."

Click here for the full article on the BBC News site.