Mobile phone supplied by Camtel (Cameroonian Telecommunications) as an alternative to a fixed line telephone, manufactured by Huawei, China, 2006-2010

This mobile phone was produced for Camtel, Cameroon’s national telecommunications provider. In the late 2000s, when this phone was produced, Camtel were facing a crisis in providing new landline telephone services to customers. The existing network was oversubscribed, and laying a new cable was prohibitively expensive. Instead, mobile phones like this one were issued. However, unlike most mobile phones, they were tethered to a particular area. That meant that although they used mobile phone technology which was much cheaper to install than a new landline phone, the phone only worked in a small region near the owner’s home or office.