Article
Africans in rural areas still have limited access to telecoms services, but lower taxes, cheaper handsets and less costly power for transmitting stations would boost their numbers, operators said this May (2007). Mobile phone use has surged in the world’s poorest continent, but the penetration rate is still only 21 percent of the total population, and subscribers are mostly in urban areas. Most of Africa’s rural areas are served by patchy telecoms infrastructure, but industry players say that could change if it were cheaper to power mobile phone base stations in those areas.