Are Internet Cafés A Thing Of The Past?

Urgh! Are internet cafés not a thing any more?!

Let me explain why I am asking.

As some of you may have noticed, I have been missing in action for the past 2 weeks. That was because I was away in Cyprus, and I like to cut myself off from the rest of the world when I am on holidays.

Like I did last year, I wanted to meet up with some people while I was over on the island. The problem is that I spent so much time this summer doing other things, that I didn’t get the ball rolling soon enough in making the arrangements.

Unfortunately, two of the skaters I would have liked to meet this year were going to be out of the country, taking the opportunity to get some valuable ice time on a full-sized rink before the seasons starts. Although I was disappointed for myself, I was delighted for them. Because having ice time on a full-sized rink is going to really help them.

With another skater, although I have been cheering her on for quite a few years, and have wanted to become friends on Facebook for almost as long, I was nervous of actually sending the request. But, I took the plunge earlier in the summer, and was delighted when she accepted me pretty much straight away. Now, because we had only recently become connected, I wanted to chat a bit before suggesting meeting. And it ended up that I didn’t actually get to drop in that I was going to be on the island and would like to meet her until the day before my flight out.

Another person I wanted to meet up with was actually I girl that I was friends with when I was at primary school. She moved to a different town in Northern Ireland when we were 10, and we lost contact. But, we got back in contact on Facebook a few years ago, and she has been working in Cyprus for the past year or so. Having not seen each other for 22 years, it would have been lovely to meet up. But, I totally forgot to contact her, and only remembered when I was on the plane!

Last year, although I started making arrangements earlier than I did this year, there were still a lot of things that couldn’t be finalised until I was actually over there.

Fortunately, I knew there was an internet café just round the corner from where we were staying. But, there were times when we were out and about that I had to be able to keep an eye out for messages on Facebook, so I had to resort to using my Dad’s smartphone (he had only recently switched to a smartphone).

I’ve already mentioned it on here a few times, but I don’t have a mobile phone, because over the years I have found that a lot of them give me really bad headaches. With some of the mobiles that my Dad has had over the years, I would be at one end of the house and would be able to tell you if my Dad was using his mobile at the other end of the house. Yet, with others, they wouldn't affect me at all. And there was no way of knowing which would affect me and which wouldn't.

Anyway, back to the subject. I have to admit, I hated the mobile version of Facebook! It is awful compared to the desktop version! And it was such a nuisance not being able to view your private messages with the rest of Facebook in the internet browser, but instead having to download a separate programme. Plus, I HATE touch screens with a passion!

Fast forward a year, and everything has changed. My Dad was always very against social networking sites. But, a few months ago, one of his friends bullied him into joining Facebook so that it would be easier for him to keep in touch with things happening in an association they are both in.

And he very quickly become totally addicted! Every time you look at him, he is futtering away on his phone. So, I knew fine well I would have to do things differently than last year.

Apart from anything else, I don't know enough about mobile phones to know if it is even possible to use a different Facebook account to the the one that is normally used on that phone.

So, the day after we arrived, I went down the street, and discovered that the internet café was no longer there. Half of it was now a bicycle rental shop, and the other half, well, I’m not sure what it was (all the windows and doors are permanently shuttered. But any time the door happened to be open, you couldn’t see any computers).

It used to be that a lot of eating houses would have a computer where customers could check their e-mails or whatever. But now, no-where seems to do that any more. Instead, they just have a sign saying “Free Wi-Fi access here”. Which is fine if you have a Wi-Fi device with you, but I didn’t.

We were staying in Limassol. But, I was keeping an eye out in all the other towns that we went to, and it was the same. I couldn’t find any internet cafés. So, I wasn’t able to contact anybody, and hence didn’t get to meet anybody.

So now I’m curious to know whether it is the same in other parts of the world. Are internet cafés becoming a thing of the past?

I can understand that it is far cheaper for establishments like eating houses to provide Wi-Fi access than it is to provide and maintain computers. But, it is not fair on people who do not have a Wi-Fi device with them.

As for internet cafés, I thought that the whole idea of them was to provide access to computers for people who can’t afford to buy their own. So, surely just providing Wi-Fi access is defeating the whole purpose.

I can tell you something. This experience has really reinvigorated my desire to find somebody who can refurbish my laptop.

(For those who don’t know, I haven’t been able to use my laptop for about 3 or 4 years because it was seriously overheating. I could just buy a new one, but don’t want to because laptops nowadays don’t include half the things that I had – and used regularly – in my old one. The manufacturers are obsessed with making laptops lighter and thinner, which means taking out things like DVD drives, floppy drives, and all sockets except USB sockets. Which means that to get everything that I had built-in in my old laptop, I would need to carry around lots of peripherals, which I can’t be bothered with. Instead, I would like somebody to take my laptop and effectively build a new one out of it. But I can’t find anybody to do it).

Sorry for waffling on. I could have just asked the question, but wanted to explain the context.

CaroLiza_fan

I would have to say that they are basically found in only third world countries and fast disappearing there, going the way of the pay phone.
Dont know about N. Ireland but here in the states smartfones are almost free anymore, and if you are poor, they ARE free.
I am sorry about your headaches. I was an electronic tech, living in a high RF environment for 30 years. My partner (there was two of us at the state patrol office in Spokane District 4) said he got headaches from cell fones of different frequency bands close to him.
We other techs though this odd as we would all go up to mountain top radiosites that were so alive with radiation of all bands that some of them you couldnt stay long as you would litterally be cooked...not many but some.
Other than libraries here, and business rooms in hotels, other folks computers are tough to find. Tablets may operate on a different band for wifi than the current cell fone bands. I dont know if that frequency band would effect you so you would have to do some blind testing with your friends.

We live in a world that is polluted with RF energy from all sorts of sourses...car remotes on up to 10,000 watt transmitters. Personally, I use the speaker phone on my cell fone to keep the transmitter away from my brain . A little distance goes a long way as RF energy disapates as the square of the distance.

I feel your pain about techilogical change. My two desktops still have DVD drives and are still fixable. I bought a "laptop" with a HDMI output so I could watch skating over the web on my big screen. It wont update its software cause it has a fixed amount of ram that can not be added to and no hard drive. Planned obselecence.

Chris who still has a tape deck. But it also has a USB port for a thumbdrive that will hold every song I ever bought in the last 60 years.....
(There may be a research institute that is interested in studying your condition and you might even get some money for participation. Just a thought)

Providing computers a la internet cafes just isn't efficient for most businesses. Someone has to maintain them and clean them up- literally and figuratively. There is software that will return a computer to it's 'standard' state upon reboot to cleanup cookies and other things left behind. If they are in cafe's or restaurants, people spill and drop food all over them.

With the availability of hand held devices, it's just not work the headaches. There are some places in airports where they have ipads attached to tables for use. I think I was at Newark airport and ate at one of the freestanding restaurants in the terminal - ordered food on the ipad and was able to do some surfing while at the table.

I'm going to assume wi-fi doesn't bother you, only (some) cell phones. For years my daughter traveled with a laptop (for use at her destination) and an ipod touch, which she used on wi-fi in place of a cell phone. I don't think you can use it for voice, but you can use it for email (and probably things like facebook). The nice things about ipods are that they're cheap and small. But I don't know if they make them any more.

Today's equivalent would be an ipad mini. It's bigger than an ipod, but still easy to carry around. And it connects to the ubiquitous free wi-fi.

If your laptop hasn't been operational for 4 years, I would consider it toast. Even if you could get the overheating problem fixed, it's probably on its last legs anyway. The disk drive can fail at any time, says someone whose disk drive failed utterly.

New computers don't have floppy drives and CD-ROM drives etc because they aren't needed any more. A memory stick will hold loads more and is cheaper and more re-usable. And they don't need lots of different types of connectors because everything plugs in to USB sockets.

As an aside, my daughter still has her ipod and it's still going strong. Her car's sound system doesn't have an auxiliary input, and a CD is permanently stuck in the CD player, so she uses her ipod as a music source. She bought a nifty little device that takes the ipod output and puts out a weak FM signal, which is picked up by her car radio.

And like Chris, I haven't seen an internet cafe in years. The only public-use computers I've seen are at public libraries and at hotels/hostels/etc.

Thank you for the replies, particularly for the insights into the radiation.

Wi-Fi does actually affect me. Well, the British Telecom (BT) hubs do anyway. We have a version 2 hub, and had to switch off the Wi-Fi as soon as it was installed because it was that bad. So, we just use Ethernet cables for everything around the house. My Uncle moved back to Northern Ireland from Dublin last year, and he went for BT for his broadband as well. He got a version 5 hub, but because he is in a 2 storey house, he does use the Wi-Fi. And it affects me when I am around there.

But, when we were in Cyprus, there was a Cyprus Telecommunications Authority (CYTA) hub in the apartment. And it didn’t affect me at all. And nor did the Wi-Fi in any of the public spaces we were in. Which is why I was so annoyed that I hadn’t got my laptop refurbished and could have brought it with me. (Although, the weight probably would have made it prohibitive for putting into my luggage).

I would love to find out if there are particular frequencies that affect me, because being able to use portable devices would make life a lot easier in situations like this. But, not knowing which ones would affect me and which ones wouldn’t is a real nuisance.

A tablet probably would be a good solution, as I wouldn't be using it for talking anyway (I hate the way my voice sounds over the phone, or on video). But, as I said above, I hate touch screens with a passion. I just can't get the hang of them. I prefer having a physical keyboard with actual buttons. Of course, I know that you can get keyboards that can plug into tablets, which would solve that problem. But, for somebody who is used to a 16 inch screen, I would say that something smaller would be a culture shock.

Hey, can I tell you a story? Before I went away, I was looking online for events that were going to be on during our holidays. And I found a concert at a Roman amphitheatre near the town we were staying in on 1st September by an orchestra from Amsterdam. But we didn’t want to order the tickets so far in advance in case something happened and we couldn’t go. However, when we arrived on the island, we had great difficulty finding shops that sold the tickets. So, I managed to get my Dad to hand over his phone, and went to the website that sold the tickets. And I just couldn’t get the button for the English language version of the website to press! (It was at the very top right hand corner of the page, so it was an awkward position). So, I decided to chance my arm and try the Greek version. And when trying to press the button to order tickets for the orchestra (in the middle of the screen), I kept pressing the button for the event below it!

So, I gave up. Small touch screens just don’t like me. We did eventually find a shop that sold the tickets a few days later. And the concert was great!

Anyway, back to the subject.

Funnily enough, I have never seen an internet café over here. But, that may be because I never needed to use one, and so wasn't looking. There are bound to be ones in Belfast that I never came across because, when I was down there for Uni, I had my laptop in my room and there was a massive 3 storey building filled with computers at the campus for us to use. And then there was the desktop when I was at home at the weekends.

Incidentally, that is one of the reasons I want to have a laptop with the DVD drive built in. USB was only starting to catch on back then, so I have an awful lot of stuff from Uni backed up to DVDs. Plus, a lot of the programmes I would be putting on it have installation discs. The other reason, of course, is so that I can watch things that I have taped on DVD's!

I admit, I am a bit of a dinosaur when it comes to technology. I am a great believer in backwards compatibility, and that manufacturers should keep the old technology still working alongside the new technology.

Floppy discs are useless nowadays as the amount they can hold wouldn't even cover one digital photo. However, my parents got me an expensive Yamaha keyboard (as in piano, not typing device) for my birthday / Christmas one year when I was a youngster, and it has a floppy drive in it so that you can find MIDI files for tunes, and put them into the keyboard to play along with. When we got a new desktop a few years ago, we couldn't get one with a floppy drive. So, that is why I don't want to lose the floppy drive on the laptop as well.

During the year before we got the new desktop, we had bought one of those wee photo printers with the ambition of printing off all our digital photos (that idea soon went out the window! ) But, when we got the new desktop, it turned out that the photo printer was not compatible with the new version of Windows that had just come out (Windows 7). Thankfully, we were able to continue using the photo printer using virtual Windows XP mode. But, I still say that Microsoft should have made their new operating system backwards compatible.

Just leaving computers for a moment – my DVD / Hard Disc Recorder died the day before I went on holidays. So yesterday, I was looking at replacements. And I was shocked to see how few holes there are in the back of the ones you get nowadays – just 5! 1 HDMI out socket, 1 aerial in socket, 1 aerial out socket, 1 Ethernet socket and 1 USB socket. Like, the old one has all this as well as 2 SCART sockets and various RCA sockets. And I actually need these so that I can copy things from the Sky box onto DVD; to connect it to the VCR to send the signal to other TV’s in the house (no RF loop in boxes nowadays); and to connect to the Hi-Fi so that we can get decent sound (the speakers on flat screen TV’s are just useless!)

You guys are right – the manufacturers of these things deliberately give them a built in shelf-life so that you have to replace them a few years down the line. And it is not fair on us consumers.

But, that is another matter.

CaroLiza_fan

I'm a Luddite, know very little about computers and am the bane of the IT desk's life. At home we have three computers - an aging desktop (which we got the local computer place to build specifically with DVD and floppy access, next one we'll try for the former if not the latter), a large laptop which does have a DVD drive but is - as you said - not the lightest, and a small notebook which only has USB ports but quite a few of them and a decent amount of RAM (very important, the little lightest ones have pretty much none ). And then I got external hard drives the size of packs of cards but with eNORmous capacity (the most recent is a whopping 4 TB) and I have ripped a lot of my DVDs and CDs to them, along with ebooks, scans and docs, and everything I'd usually keep on the computer's drive or on DVDs.

And it isn't even half full yet. I take it to work, plug it in to my work computer and and listen to the music while earning my keep, I take it and the baby notebook on holiday and don't need anything else if the hotel (or local Macca) has free wifi.

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Hmmm, no I'm wondering if the DVD drive is the reason why my laptop was stolen. The laptop was 9 years old, but I really only used it for internet and quicken. So, when a windows 10 upgrade crashed and made the laptop inoperable, I debated getting a new one, but decided I could wait. So I bought it to a repair place that a co-worker's husband's employer used - just recover data and reload with windows 8. Dropped it off with a deposit fee on a Saturday, received a call Monday that it was ready and when I arrived to pick it up the following Saturday, they said I had already picked it up..... Ummm, no I did not. Did not care for the owners attitude - he seemed to be more suspicious of me.... They were able to dig through their week's paperwork and found the credit card slip used to pay the balance of payment - the person did this on THursday. With the date and timestamp on the receipt, they were able to find footage of the woman who took my laptop. I did not recognize her - I hadn't even told anyone that I had taken the laptop in for service at the location. I had my paperwork and it had been in my car the entire week. The video showed the woman handing the associate a piece of paper that looked like a work order, the kid typing the order # into the computer. He then brought out the computer and reviewed the work, noting the broken hinge. When I brought it in, the kid said they'd find out if the part was available and when they said it was ready, he mentioned that the hinge wasn't available. When the woman was told about the hinge, she asked if it could be fixed - she opened up the laptop and looked at it without turning it on.

I let the owner of the place have a couple of days to talk to his employees to find out if anyone recognized her and to get the contact info of the person named on the card and to allow for the possibility that the woman was given the wrong laptop and would return it when finding out it was the wrong one (i.e. perhaps she was doing a favor someone else and didn't know what it looked like.)


I had to chase after the owner. Filed a police report a couple of days afterwards. When I went to get a copy of the report about 2 1/2 weeks later, I stopped to get the status - the least they could do was get the contact info for the credit card to find out if the cc was stolen and get a copy of the video as evidence if they ever caught her. No one had been assigned to the case... sigh.... I repeated what details I recalled. About 10 days later, the detective called me to say that they had gotten copies of the cc receipt and video and spoken to employees. They are issuing a subpoena to get the credit card contact info. At this point, I''m not expecting to get the laptop back.


I ended buying a Lenova Yoga 920. It has a touchscreen which I actually like more than I thought I would. It's kind cool that you can enlarge the image like you would on a smartphone and touch the screen instead of mouse clicks. At work, some of the consultants have touchscreens and I could see how it's useful during presentations to quickly enlarge or resize by touch instead of fumbling with a mouse with less precision.

I do agree that the # of ports is greatly reduced. This one only has 2 thunderbolt drives and 1 usb drive. In general it's enough, unless I'm using a wireless keyboard and also want to backup something to a flash drive. There are adapters and hubs that can be purchased to expand the # of USB drives and they also include slots for a media card reader too.

Still just shocked that someone would steal a 9 yr old computer. Immediately afterwards, I froze my credit on all 3 credit sites, set alerts on all of my financial accounts and changed my user name and password on my accounts.


Luckily, the repair place still had my data on their computer. I was really annoyed that I had to pay for a flash drive for them to put it on, but also glad that I didn't lose everything. However, also perturbed that they still had the data, which included my tax returns, etc. So far, no signs of identity fraud, etc.

The last time I used an Internet cafe was in Cape Town, South Africa. I was living in a neighborhood full of visiting medical students though so that might have had something to do with it (this was in 2013 so I'm not even sure it's still there). I don't remember the last time I saw one in the USA.

I think that a new laptop including one or two USB sticks with all the necessary info you will need abroad for contacts etc. could be a good solution. Besides, planning your trip and contacts well ahead would also help a lot, LOL.

There's no need for Internet Cafe's in most countries anymore.
WiFi is commonly available for free (at least in my country) - and it includes free Wifi on (most) buses, beaches, trains, shopping malls and restaurants.
Mobile internet is also fast and reliable - A lot of people by an "international mobile internet" package for going abroad - it's not the cheapest, but very useful.

Try local libraries!

Here in Uruguay they still work very well, especially in the countryside.

Most Internet Cafés give technological classes and advice for elder people who are starting to use a computer. Also, if you give classes you have certain benefits.

As an example: if I help an elder to send an e-mail (happens almost every day), I win "points" which can be exchanged for free printings (very useful for university paperwork) or for printer ink (if you have a certain amount of points).

I have never seen internet cafes in Brazil. Whenever I read about them, it feels foreign.
In fact, the only time I used one was when I was in London back in 2012. It was really easy to find one, and if you bought a water, you got 30 minutes free (which was more than I needed). I was back in Europe this year and saw none, but then, I wasn't looking.
You foreign folks are all very lucky with how a valuable Wi-Fi is. The only places in my city that offer free Wi-Fi never have it working. And phone data is expensive.
At least my university offers WiFi that works...

MalAssada said:

I have never seen internet cafes in Brazil. Whenever I read about them, it feels foreign.
In fact, the only time I used one was when I was in London back in 2012. It was really easy to find one, and if you bought a water, you got 30 minutes free (which was more than I needed). I was back in Europe this year and saw none, but then, I wasn't looking.
You foreign folks are all very lucky with how a valuable Wi-Fi is. The only places in my city that offer free Wi-Fi never have it working. And phone data is expensive.
At least my university offers WiFi that works...

Click to expand...

There are everywhere, at least until recently. I lived in Rio since I was 2 and left in 1999. There were so many at the Port of Rio and tons in Copa. Last time we were back for 3 months during the World Cup, there were still plenty. During the WC many restaurants and cafes with free wifi but you need to ask for their password.

Maybe on the last 4 years people move on to small devices and things changes drastically which is very possible in this time and age.

There are some in Germany, I also know there are at Tokyo and Melbourne, or new York (the waypoint). Most of these, are for gamers, but i went there as well, when the wifi broke down after weather conditions during tournaments.

They certainly exist, but the average joe might not go there, as he or she will have a mobile phone and or internet at work / home.

If your back packing, motels and internet cafe shops will be your only source of communication It´s the metting point for great adventures in RL.

Both the public libraries in my town have computers for public use.