Rhymer Rigby’s piece, The phone boxes with legs, describes “human phone boxes” in Bolivia ‚àö¬± and a whole new way to make smart use of mobile phones.

Thanks, FerVil.

You see them everywhere in Bolivia, from La Paz to Cochabamba to Santa Cruz, wandering the streets, dressed in bright company livery, mobile phones chained to their waists. They are the latest, strangest additions to the telecoms network. They are Bolivia’s human phone boxes.

In a bizarre marriage of developed-world technology and developing world labour, Bolivia’s telephone companies ‚àö¬± such as Viva, Entel and Telecel ‚àö¬± have come up with an ingenious alternative to conventional public telephony. Instead of laying lines and building booths, they simply give employees mobile phones and uniforms, and send them out on to the streets. Any punter who wants to make a call then approaches the employee and pays anything from one Boliviano (about 9p) per minute.

It sounds unlikely, but the system is so popular that these human phone boxes now greatly outnumber their glass and metal counterparts.