However, aggregate statistics on the number of official public telephones do not really tell the full story about access in La Paz and El Alto<sup>5</sup> . On the one hand, public telephones are not always very accessible since in order to avoid vandalism telephones in outlying locations are often located inside retail outlets, and are therefore not available outside of normal retail hours.

On the other hand, the informal sector has effectively ‘privatized’ the public telephone service. First, many of the small street vendors or ‘anaqueleros’ have their own telephone lines (often coming straight out of the payment) which they rent out to the public for local calls at a fixed charge for a maximum three minute call. Indeed, the current telecommunications law explicitly allows for such small-scale resale of services. Second, vendors of public telephone coupons<sup>6</sup> have been observed to padlock public telephone booths. This allows them to improve their sales by forcing any prospective callers to purchase coupons from them in return for securing access to the public telephone booth.

**Impact on coverage.** To what extent did the increase in new connections feed through into significant improvements in service coverage? A number of methodological considerations complicate the drawing of inferences about coverage rates from data on the number of household connections<sup>7</sup> . Hence, as a cross-check, the resulting coverage rates were compared with those reported in the Encuesta Continua de Hogares, 1999. Any major discrepancies are reported in the text. Notwithstanding, some uncertainty over the absolute level of connections, the results reveal interesting differences in the pattern of coverage trends between La Paz (Figure 3.6) and El Alto (Figure 3.7).

In the city of La Paz, progress in coverage of electricity, water and sewerage services has been modest since the reform. However, this reflects the fact that coverage was already close to universal for water and electricity. While the AISA concession contract, required 5 Interview with Willy Garcia, Gerente Técnico, COTEL and Ismael Carrasco, Jefe de Servicios Básicos, SITTEL, 15th September 2000.

6 A monopoly for the sale of these coupons has been given to registered blind people to provide them with a source of livelihood.

7 There are two basic problems. The first, which affects all of the services, relates to the fact that the last Census took place in 1992, so that current population estimates are based on projections from a baseline that is nearly ten years old. The second problem arises when a single connection is shared by a number of households. This is particularly common in the water and sewerage sector where large apartment blocks are often served by a single meter. It may also arise in electricity and fixed line telephony, for example, when a number of families share a single house. It is therefore necessary to make assumptions about the number of inhabitants per connection. For water and sewerage, the calculations follow the practice adopted by AISA of assuming 12 inhabitants per connection in La Paz and 9 in El Alto, reflecting the greater prevalence of apartment buildings in La Paz. For electricity, the calculations follow the practice adopted by Electropaz of assuming 5 inhabitants per connection in La Paz and 6 in El Alto. In this case, the issue is not one of apartment buildings since each apartment typically has its own electricity meter. The differences between the two cities simply reflect beliefs about larger household size in El Alto. For fixed telephones, there is no convention of reporting household connection rates but rather number of lines per 100 inhabitants. In order to compute coverage statistics equivalent to those for the water and electricity sectors, the same assumptions about household size have been assumed as in the case of Electropaz.

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