For some time now, a dominant cultural meme – a word I use experimentally and won’t repeat, since it evoked a fierce gag reflex as I typed it – holds that there will be more of everything in the future, especially people, and that stuff will cost more, unless it’s digital hardware in which case it will cost less and there will be way more of it.

Real estate crashes and the more serious specter of deflation suggest that in fact stuff may not always cost more. And according to UN demographers, while global population will continue to rise for some time, there are places where population is shrinking.

This sounds like good news, considering global warming etc., but it may not be, if your business depends on selling more stuff next year than you did this year. Fewer customers just makes your job harder. And if that shrinking customer base already has a lot of your stuff, it’s harder still.

Consider the situation in the developing world, as shown in the chart below, which plots mobile subscription penetration against projected population growth for 135 countries. (I ran out of label space in the middle; email me if you’re curious and I’ll send you the whole list.)

Rapidly growing population and low mobile penetration (lower right of the chart) does not necessarily mean a country is a terrific opportunity. Afghanistan, for example, has some issues as a business environment. But the scenario of high mobile penetration and shrinking population (upper left) raises a unique set of challenges to growth.

Clearly, penetration on a user basis in these countries is lower than 100%; subscription penetration is particularly high in Russia and elsewhere because of multiple SIM and multiple device ownership. So it is not the case that everybody who wants a mobile phone already has one. But an awful lot of them do. And a shrinking population means fewer first time buyers are entering the market.

Clearly, the focus for an operator in a developing country with high penetration and low or negative population growth needs to be different than in the more usual case of emerging markets with rapid population growth and low penetration. Loyalty and churn reduction become critical, as does revenue enhancement through incremental service offerings, and in particular, cold-eyed and ruthless cost justification of network expansion. If you build it, they won’t come if they’re just not there.

"I have been over into the future and it works” said Lincoln Steffens after a 1921 visit to Russia. Well, I have been over into one version of the present –Internet access in Manila via 3G dongle – and I’m not quite as optimistic as Steffens. True, Globe Tattoo is way better than my hotel’s lame Wi-Fi, but I don’t think it’s a long term solution for connectivity, whether for the First, Second, or Third World. Good news first. Setup was easy. The instructions showed clearly how the SIM card slips into the Huawei-built dongle, which my computer recognized with no issues.  

After a couple of minutes of software loading, I was online, at respectable if not blazing speeds. Keeping half an eye on a speed meter, I recorded one instantaneous burst of 539.4 kbps, and several in the 200’s and 300’s, although the average was a lot lower.

• Considering the slow dial-up speeds the hotel’s Wi-Fi was delivering, I wasn’t unhappy. And as a bonus, Globe is cheaper. Globe bills at PHP 5 (US$ 0.11) per 15 minute increment. This would be PHP 480 (US$ 10.90) for 24 hours, versus the hotel’s PHP 600 (US$ 13.65).

So what’s not to like? Inconsistency, for one thing. Those average speeds contained a lot of slow periods mixed with some high speed bursts. Even when stationary it kept slipping from HSDPA to what it calls 3G to EDGE speeds. This presumably reflects the shifting burden of traffic on capacity-limited cell sites even in (I blush to admit) one of Manila’s more upscale districts.

This is a problem for applications like Strategy Analytics’ VPN, which requires regular communication from the client. Something – possibly the dead spells or the switching from HSDPA to 3G – interferes with that check-in process, dropping me many times. VoIP is out of the question – I couldn’t even talk with Globe customer service.And what did I want to talk with Customer Service about? Why, how to add more funds to my account, of course. Tattoo may be imperfect, but it beats the alternative.

• And speaking of alternatives, this experience has made me appreciate that the emerging market opportunity for overlay wireless data networks, whether WiMAX or LTE, is not just a rural and secondary city play. There might be a few takers right here in Makati.