Smartphones ring death knell of cyber cafés

Smartphones ring death knell of cyber cafés
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The high-speed internet just at finger tips at a cheap cost has brought death knell to cyber cafes, which were once seen at every corner of the city.  There is 90 per cent fall in internet business and those existing are surviving on photocopying, typesetting and printing which can never get back the charm of cyber cafe.

Hyderabad: The high-speed internet just at finger tips at a cheap cost has brought death knell to cyber cafes, which were once seen at every corner of the city. There is 90 per cent fall in internet business and those existing are surviving on photocopying, typesetting and printing which can never get back the charm of cyber cafe.

Every man in search of information would linger on cyber cafes for hours, standing in queues to wait for their turn to enter the domain of the world wide web, students toiled for projects and men of leisure for downloads. Nonetheless, business was at peak between 2008 to 2012, thereafter the internet market was slowly conquered by fiber optic cables and lightening speed internet on mobiles.

Nilesh, a mechanical engineer who lives at Mehdipatnam, said “I used to spend hours at the internet café to browse information for my college projects, and to generate new ideas of thinking without being tracked by service providers, these days I use Virtual Private Network (VPN) tools which are quite reliable, but nothing can bring the charm of the internet café.”

“There was a sudden decline in the year 2013, market came down up to 90 per cent. We used to host 30 cabins to our visitors, now our business only depends on a very few online services, printing and xerox machines. Moreover, the printing business is barely profitable,” said Gowtam, a cyber café owner. However some people think that It’s the evolution of technology, Vinitha, a student, said “Now you have megabytes of speed on phones then why go to the internet, you can also scan documents using applications on smartphones without rushing to internet store every time.”

Another cyber café owner at Khairtabad, Ayush said “We uses to have 25 cabins and the business flourished with the college students who used internet, not the business barely runs on printing and scanning documents. Many of our partners have shifted to other businesses since the drastic decline happened.”

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