The road from Nairobi winds 160 kilometers to that town deep in Masai country, the asphalt giving way to sand and dust, until finally it is just a dirt track climbing by broken hills and plunging back to desert flats. The going is slow.

The outpost, with about 4,000 inhabitants, is at the end of that road and beyond the reach of ability lines. It has no bank, no post office, few cars and little infrastructure. Newspapers reach in a bundle every three or four weeks. At night, most folks light kerosene lamps and candles in their houses or fires in their huts and go to bed early, except for the farmers guarding crops against elephants and buffalo.

Entasopia, a sudden oasis fed by a few mountain springs, is the last place on earth that a traveler would expect to find an Net connection. Yet it was here, in November, that three young aerospace engineers from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, with financial backing from Google, installed a small satellite dish powered by a solar panel, to hook up a handful of computers in the community center to the rest of the world.

In recent years the mobile phone has emerged as the main contemporary communications link for rural areas of Africa. From 2002 to 2007, the number of Kenyans using cell phones grew nearly tenfold to reach about a third of the population, many of whom did not have land lines, according to the worldly Telecommunication Union. But many of the phones were simple models made more for talking than Web surfing, and wireless goods networks are slow, with sporadic coverage.

Satellite connections are faster and more stable, which is why they are attracting interest from the likes of Google, as a way to supply Web connections to an estimated 95…

[Source] dhiram