The tying of a phone to these bottles of water with plastic twine renders the water much more challenging to sell, basically making the bottles a permanent, un-sellable fixture on account of the challenges in removing a water bottle or, if you are a thief, removing the phone from the water bottles. The demonstrated need to secure this phone showcases an interesting downside to this “wireless” (battery-powered, cable-free) CDMA handset, within which is contained a thumbnail-sized piece of plastic and metal worth about US $1000: portability becomes steal-ability/liability when SIM cards are this valuable.

Indeed, this wire-free portability makes the microenterprise of “human telephone booths” possible, where people (usually children) act as a portable, common phone-bearer, running to hunt down people lacking landlines and cellphones that live within their rough “service range” and acting as message-takers when those being called are unreachable.