Versi's company has sold 500 microwave antennas to connect about 1,000 customers in both Kinshasa and neighboring Brazzaville, Republic of Congo, two capitals that face each other across the Congo River. Raga customers connect to the Internet at about 128 kilobits per second using Israeli Breezecom wireless modems. Like everywhere else, e-mail is the most popular Internet application for Africans. Jensen found that Africans send few e-mails within a country. A full 65 percent are external communications that otherwise would never have been made.
African governments remain the biggest obstacle to growth in information technology.
Most charge hefty duties on imported equipment and control phone lines needed to connect. According to the United Nations, there are as many telephones in Tokyo as there are in all of Africa. State-owned Telkom Kenya fiercely defends its Jambonet monopoly, refusing to grant Internet service providers permission to set up their own satellite dishes to circumvent overloaded international circuits. As a result, many ISPs maintain their sites on servers in the United States or Europe. Lack of bandwidth is another obstacle, with only 15 out of 51 countries capable of transmitting data overseas at the modest broadband rate of 1 megabit per second, a data speed common for a single small business in the developed world.