Yesterday, I traveled 460km through rural Kenya. One very notable thing is that adverts for mobile phone airtime are plastered everywhere, painted on to shop fronts in even the smallest villages. There are 2,546,200 mobile phone lines in Kenya compared to only 299,300 land lines (source: CIA World Factbook, 2004 figures). For a population of 34,700,000, that indicates a significant reach for mobile phones and a pretty poor reach for landlines. The two competing vendors, Celtel and Safaricom, provide a very low cost service, affordable enough that mobile phones are everywhere.

Partly, the success of mobiles over landlines is down to infrastructure costs. Mobile phone infrastructure is much cheaper to install. Limited telecoms liberalisation has created a fierce competitive battle between the two operators, and ending the ban on Voice over IP (which many people ignored) is giving people cheaper calls at the office or home, too.

But part of the problem with landlines is that they are run by a state-run monopoly. One thing that is notable is that organisations here typically publish a range of landline phone numbers on their letterheads and business cards. One business card I received has seven phone numbers in addition to mobile and fax numbers.

Engaged tones when calling landlines are commonplace. I am told that there is an 18 month wait for new residential lines - and in some places as long as a three year wait. And if you want to plug in a fax machine, it costs more.

I am told that the problem with engaged tones and needing to give out multiple numbers is that the state-owned landline company, priced multiple lines on the same number much more cheaply than individual lines with individual numbers. The result, apparently, is that they refuse to install multiple lines on the same number. The landlines are also a lot less reliable than mobile networks. This is not about poverty. It is a classic state monopoly situation.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter because mobiles solve the problem. Business carries on. People paint their mobile numbers on the side of their vans and on their letterheads. The situation is not perfect, but a little bit of liberalisation solves a lot of problems. The private sector makes Kenyan telecoms work.