The TeleCommons Development Group of GrameenPhone, a telecom company in Bangladesh, assesses its impact on poverty reduction and rural social and economic development. The Asia Branch Poverty Reduction Project, Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), focuses on GrameenPhone’s Village Phone (VP) program, which provides micro-credit cellular phone service to women operators and users. The program currently involves 950 VPs, providing telephone access to over 65,000 people. The Village Phone program generates significant social and economic benefits, including a large consumer surplus and quality of life benefits. The cost of a single phone call from a village to Dhaka ranges from 2.64% to 9.8% of the mean monthly household income, saving poor rural people between 132 to 490 Taka ($2.70 to $10 USD) for individual calls. Grameen Bank members use the telephone for discussions of financial matters with family (42%), and social calls (44%), accounting for 86% of all calls. Remittances from overseas workers are used for daily household expenses, capital items, and consumer goods. Village Phone operators derive about 24% of the household income on average, becoming socially and economically empowered. However, regulatory constraints hinder service demand and GSM cell phone technology is high-cost and limited for rural areas due to cumbersome regulatory practices. The program addresses gender in universal telecommunication access, but ensures full accessibility of Village Phone for revenue generation and profitability is crucial.