if the answer will be yes, I am going to reduce the price… just kidding.
Anyway, so why don’t the internet cafes continually evolve towards greater and greater no-frills efficiency and hence lower and lower marginal cost? If buildings cost money, how about making it like a vending machine, without a building, and maybe with a small attached “chair”? If security costs money, how about just hardening it up a bit?
I have actually heard about something like that being implemented by some do-gooder in India for indigent children, presumably for free.
But why aren’t such solutions growing and showing up in popular culture? We all know about Japanese capsule hotels, but where are stories of Indian outdoors “if it were any cheaper, we would have had to pay you” internet cafes?
ok, here is evidence of a $0.15 or thereabouts cyber cafe in Myanmar http://madyjune.blogspot.com/2007/07/cheapest-cybercafe-in-town.html . Presumably no special technology involved. Which could mean that with appropriate technology the price could be pushed down much further, absent exorbitant taxes to government or its local organized crime equivalent.
That does raise an important point, however, in that once even poor people get at least a decent pda if not a real smartphone there would be no real need for cyber cafes beyond provision of wifi and maybe social space for gamers.
Yeah there’s several still in my town. I dunno how the €1 an hour ones survive. In the airport there’s vending machine like internet stations, with free phone charging.
An even better reason for not doing it. Now you could at least throw them out because they aren’t paying for anything. Now, if you call the cops, they could rightfully say that they were paying for the services that you had advertised.
There is one right around the corner from my apartment in Chicago. It is a heavily Hispanic neighborhood, and also fairly low income, so that is probably a factor. But their access is $2.50 an hour.
In rural Thailand and Chiang Mai, 50 cents per hour (15 baht) seems to be a standard price. In Bangkok’s major shopping areas, $2 per hour is more typical. (I know of one Bangkok shop (in Pratunam Big C) with $1/hour as nominal price, but it works out to $1.67, IIRC, for 61 minutes. :smack: )
Internet shops at Thailand’s major tourist destinations may have much higher prices.
I think I’ve seen them as low as .10 an hour in India, and .20-$.50 in various parts of the world.
I think a major stumbling block is that people often don’t have much of a use for it- the local forms of communication are still quite functional, so email isn’t useful, and they don’t have a huge need for a lot of stuff that basically just wastes time.
At that price, they need 2000 hours just to cover the cost of a $200 PC. That’s a whole year at 8 hrs per day. How much are they spending on their PCs, their rent, their internet connection, their electricity, and other overhead expenses - like salaries?
Okay, fine. Let’s say 8 AM to midnight, that’s 16 hours. It’s still going to take a half year just to pay for a $200 PC. How expensive are the machines they’re using, and how long do they last?
I think the “various parts of the world” is the key part. In the developed world, electricity, staffing costs, rent, payroll, and bandwidth are going to cost significantly more than elsewhere.
Billing $0.10 per hour would not be feasible in the US based on employee pay alone. The US minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. So, assuming just a single minimum wage employee running the cafe, you’d need 73 occupied computers to cover just base pay. This ignores the fact that it’s not reasonable for a single employee to monitor that much gear.
Add cost of equipment, bandwidth, electricity, etc, and the figures just don’t add up. Not to mention there will certainly be lull periods where there just aren’t so many customers.
In Peru, depending on location and the qauality of the machines you’ll get from 15 to 50 US an hour.
The machines are mostly Pentium 4 with 15" CRT monitors, windows XP. Many people us it for messneger, chat, skype and that sort of thing. Many people don’t have home PCs or an internet conenctions. They are open 16 to 18 houts a day.
Their other business is multiplayer games, for them they can open 24 hours.
