Those are lower middle class people buying those services. The poor would be choosing between their cellphones and shelter. Am not saying there are no people that choose to be homelessness and keep their cellphone, but there aren't very many.
It's not at all unusual to see homeless people with mobile phones. Some homeless shelters even provide them to clients, to help them with job hunting. And it's not like anyone is "choosing to be homeless" by spending $5/month on a prepaid cell phone.
In all seriousness, "poor" to me does not mean homeless. In fact, there are many people above the poverty line who I consider poor (the so-called "working poor".) Obviously this is different for you, and it's silly to have an argument over semantics.
If someone insists on trying to communicate applying their own individual definition to terms of common usage that are different than those others in a region uses, they themselves are the ones that will have difficulty communicating their ideas.
If the discussion is about poverty and the poor, and the discussion is in the US, the US Gov't standard would be the reasonable standard for terminology to be derived.
So a single person with no dependents is considered poor in the US if they make less than $10,590 or roughly 10/11 K a year. I responded to Sterling's statement that said poor people love cellphone because people that make less than 10/11K a year don't have cell phone because they can't afford them.
If you go through tracfone.com you can get into a phone and have very minimal service for less than $100 a year. That's slightly less than 1% of gross income, which is probably low for what people in that situation spend on communication.
Now you or I would find the service cripplingly limited. But for someone who really needs it. It's there.
It is quite obvious from the article that "poor" was used there in sense of "not rich". Like, when one says "I'm a poor student" he doesn't necessarily mean he lives in cardboard box and hunts for his lunch in city park.
