However, a country like Ghana, in Africa, scored only 0.11 computers per 100 people. For one, access to the Internet is significantly simpler in the North. The opposite is largely true for the South. As a result, users in those countries must pay for expensive international communications in order to connect to the Internet. Additionally, as was indicated by the International Telecommunications Union statistics, most of the world's population lacks basic telecommunications ability.
Telephones are a luxury to most of the population of the South.
Moreover, while some of these countries may be served relatively well, the service often is confined to urban areas only, leaving out large parts of the population which are found in rural areas. Good quality telephone lines, computers and modems, which the North have in abundance, are not common in the South, where people must usually contend with antiquated and often unreliable lines in order to send and receive information. In terms of the Internet, this handicap is costly, financially speaking. For example, someone in the North with a fixed domestic link to a high-speed network that can download megabits of information per second pays very little to access a document on the Internet, especially when compared to someone in the South who accesses the same document on an unstable line using an international network that downloads only a few hundred characters of information per second. Clearly, something is needed to be done to reduce such differences in technological capability between the North and South.