Lives and deaths of cybercafés: mobile internet to blame

Abstract

This study sought to undertake a statistical and computational study of the factors behind the drastic fall in the number of patrons frequenting Internet cafés. The study used data gathered from business owners of selected cafés in Ghana, a typical Third World country, where infrastructure deficit meant the broader majority used Internet services such as surfing the Web and accessing e-mails until very recently, mainly at cafés. Likewise, people using smartphones to access the Internet were also interviewed to obtain their views on the Internet usage patterns. The principal finding of the study was that most patrons of Internet cafés now prefer to do that on their smartphones mainly because it is cheaper and more convenient and also because of security concerns they attached to their data being intercepted by would-be criminals also patronizing cafés. Additionally, patrons complained of usually very old desktop computers at cafés badly infected with viruses that often infected and destroyed their files.