An Investigation of Phone Upgrades in Remote Community Cellular Networks

In the last decade, billions of people worldwide have upgraded from basic 2G feature phones to data-enabled 4G smartphones. In most cases, people upgrade in areas with 4G coverage (typically cities and large towns), but increasingly, people choose to upgrade in areas that only have 2G coverage or no cellular coverage at all. This counterintuitive behavior -- upgrading your phone despite living in an area that does not actively support many of the features of that new device -- is the focus of this work.

We investigate the rates and reasons for 4G upgrades and adoption in two extremely remote areas in Indonesia and the Philippines. Our mixed-methods approach combines the quantitative analysis of several years of mobile phone registration logs with the qualitative analysis of multiple interviews in one of these communities. We learn that users are rapidly switching from 2G to 4G technology and skipping 3G entirely; the data suggest that these villages will soon have sufficient 4G phone adoption to justify the investment required to upgrade base stations to 4G technology. The interviews suggest people are making these switches primarily to support consumption of media such as games, videos, and music. Similarly, users switch devices because of damage, often leading to downgrades to more resilient feature phones. We also find that, despite the general value seen in more modern 4G phones, 2G phones are more shared and more active on the network.