Global: Connecting the poor is profitable

Cellular providers stand to make a better profit margin from community service telephones (CSTs) than they do from other service offerings, says Nashua Mobile MD Mark Taylor. The reason CSTs offer larger profit margins per minute is because of the disparate interconnect regime between the cellular operations and Telkom, he said. Unlike the individually-held SIM card where the user may make one or two calls per day, CSTs are used by a number of people each day, he notes.