Internet cafe

From ArticleWorld

An internet cafe (also known as a cybercafe) is a place which offers internet access for a fee, this fee is usually charged on a per hour or per minute basis.

Birth of concept

Obviously the origins of the internet cafe come from that of the traditional cafe. The founder of the concept is Ivan Pope which in the early 90’s proposed and later accomplished the development of a cafe with internet access from its tables. The first commercial enterprise was the London based Cafe Cyberia.

Description and current trends

The evolution of the concept was strictly related to the evolution of the internet itself. Nowadays internet cafes tend to spring up all over the world and they also tend to incorporate the LAN Gaming Services, which are nothing else than glorified networks of computers designed for PC games. The internet cafes also have slightly subtle differences depending on the culture they belong. For example in Southeast Asia, South Korea to be more specific, they are called PC bangs and are mainly focused on gaming, in the western world the trend is to lower the prices and discontinue the offering of grey zone services such as CD burning, to avoid copyright related troubles, also here the focus shifts more on the usage of webmail and instant messaging systems. In the developing world on the other hand the internet cafes are seen as vital tools in the lowering of the technological gap, the people here tend to use them more for serious deals, like finding information or conducting bussines. In totalitarian countries such as China they are subjected to a great deal of censorship and control.

The trend nowadays is to blur the difference between a traditional cafe and a netcafe, as more and more cafes offer internet services. The last years also saw the advent of the Internet kiosks, which are Internet access points spreaded in public places like hotels, restaurants and truck stops. The internet cafes also helped in improving the image that the Internet had in its early days and rebrand it as 'cool' .