Iraqi cell phone market

I tried pretty hard--but ultimately unsuccessfully--to get more information about this part of my article:

The cell phone market in Iraq is indeed growing fast, and it's that market that drove competition for the country's wireless spectrum at last month's auction. But a rapidly growing cellular market is both difficult to quantify and, ironically, can be a sign of economic weakness....

Today it's difficult to know how many Iraqis actively use cell phones—in part because of the frequency with which contracts lapse—but estimates range from about 7 to 12 million, a large number and sizable range in a poor country of 25 million; certainly greater than the number that use land-based telephones, which is still estimated to be about 1 million.

My suspicion--again, just a suspicion--is that these numbers are themselves inflated. If you travel to Iraq (or practically any country in the area) what you'll find, as I mention in the article, is that cell phone contracts all run month-to-month. If you plan a three month visit to Iraq, and buy service through IraqNa, you will have to renew your contract every month, and can probably expect to receive a few phone calls from strangers looking for the people who used to have your phone number.

There are, to my mind, a few statistics that would accurately characterize the size and growth of the cell phone market in Iraq. One is the number of active contracts over time. Another, perhaps better one is the number of minutes used by individuals and businesses per month (perhaps not counting calls lasting under a certain minimum length). A very bad way to do this, on the other hand, would be to count the number of new contracts signed every year or six months or whatever and point out that the number is large and growing. That's going to significantly over-count, and the greater the over counting, the worse the implications for the Iraqi economy.

The statistics I found (or was told about) were by and large very unclear about this. They referred mainly to the number of "users" or "contracts" without any sort of methodological stipulations (such as "active users", "valid contracts"). This was true of the Brookings survey, which culled its numbers directly from the Special Inspector General's Iraq Report, which in turn lifted their statistics from the State Department's Weekly Iraq Update, which lists no methodology and whose author in the Office of Near East Affairs haven't returned my calls. My suspicion is that these numbers come from wireless companies in the Middle East and that the methodology is considered proprietary information, but that it over-counts users by a significant amount (Daniel Sudnick guessed a maximum of 25 percent).

The larger point is that, no matter how deeply or shallowly you parse the economic indicators there's almost no way to make any part of the Iraqi economy look healthy or growing.