The road from Nairobi winds 100 miles to Entasopia, deep in Kenya's Masai country. The asphalt gives way to sand and dust, until finally it is just a dirt track climbing over broken hills and plunging back to desert flats. The going is slow.
The outpost, with about 4000 inhabitants, is at the end of that road and beyond the reach of power lines. It has no bank, no post office, few cars and little infrastructure. Newspapers arrive in a bundle every three or four weeks. At night, most people 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 is the last place on earth a traveller would expect to find an internet connection. Yet it was here, in November, that three young 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 centre to the world.
In recent years the mobile phone has emerged as the main modern communications link for rural areas of Africa. From 2002 to 2007, the number of Kenyans using mobile phones grew almost tenfold to reach about a third of the population, many of whom did not have land lines, according to the International Telecommunication Union.
But many of the phones were simple models made more for talking than web browsing, and wireless data 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 provide internet connections to the estimated 95 per cent of Africans who, according to the telecommunications union, have no access.
Although providing access is outside the normal business realm of Google, with this project it is looking at how obstacles might be overcome in Kenya and other parts of Africa.
The dish at Entasopia was intended to operate for months with little maintenance under harsh conditions. This station, along with two others in villages almost as remote, is part of a larger push by Google into small, marginal communities, providing them with new tools to access information, work with distant colleagues, and communicate with friends and family.
Google paid for the final design of the stations and is covering the monthly fees for satellite bandwidth. The company has also invested in O3b, a start-up that hopes to deploy a constellation of satellites over Africa by the end of next year.
The head of Google's East Africa office, Joseph Mucheru, said, ''Building infrastructure is not necessarily Google's objective, but if you look at all the areas that Google has gone into, in many cases it has been to fill a gap.'' Just how much opportunity there is remains unclear. Google is uncertain whether such satellite stations can pay for themselves in rural areas, given the cost of equipment and bandwidth. Communities may well benefit from the connection, but they do not all have the means to afford it.
But when internet connections arrive in small towns like Entasopia, they put new tools into the hands of people hungry to use them, and for some there, that has had wide repercussions.
James Mathu has worked for the Kenyan agriculture ministry in Entasopia for five years, advising farmers on the environment, crop husbandry and soil conservation. The stable internet link allows him to send information to district headquarters in Kajiado, instead of spending days travelling there and back to deliver monthly reports, which are too lengthy for him to send via mobile phone.
''It is a five-day affair,'' he said, estimating that the internet saved him 12,000 shillings a year, or (about $A237), in a country where the gross domestic product per person is $2651.
Julius Kasifu, 40, is using the internet to try to help others. His family runs a farm, but because his legs were crippled by polio as a child, he was limited in the farm work he could do.
In Masai society, he said, disabilities like his were seen as bad omens. Traditionally, disabled newborns were abandoned and their mothers put through a ritual cleansing to banish evil spirits that were said to have caused the disability, while the place where the birth took place was burned. Even now, such children are often kept hidden in the family manyatta, a wattle-and-daub hut.
Kasifu is leading a campaign to raise awareness and build a shelter, called Tuko, for such children. With the internet connection, he has been able to upload a short video about their plight.
But there are significant limits to how many Kenyans the internet can reach. Even if it is available free, not everyone can take full advantage of it. One particular obstacle is computer literacy and literacy itself: many of the adults in Entasopia, especially women, cannot read. New York Times
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