By Bizna Brand Analyst
A few weeks ago, I wrote an article on how the movie shop business was dying. Now I am afraid to say that the same thing is happening to cyber cafes. Â Six years ago, cyber cafes were everywhere. At the height of the dotcom boom the internet cafe’s future looked assured and it seemed that every high street would have one in future. But right now even locating one in Nairobi CBD is like trying to find an ear ring in huge dust bin.
The reason for this is simple – the rise of sophisticated smartphones which are making the need to go into a cafe largely redundant. Several years ago, you had to go to a cyber to access your favorite websites or social media sites (which were still a luxury but are now a necessity). Right now you just do it through your phone. We have mobile phones which offer fast connection to the net, with bigger and better screens. Who on earth would want to pay for it again in an internet cafe
Nearly 80% of Kenyans have smart phones and so people don’t use internet cafes as much as they did, a trend is set to even continue now that home internet and wifi hot-spots are becoming easily available.
The entry of Chinese phones must have been the last stroke in Internet cafes’ troubles as their loss of fortune seemed to have worsened. Considering their cheap pricing, Chinese phones and relatively cheap hardware have, in the last decade, driven up Internet access by about 30 per cent, even though no known figures have been quoted to be exact.
Internet is now ‘on the go’, people can no longer afford to sit for long hours in cafes waiting to access services in seemingly slow internet cafes since these cafes always subscribe for slow and unreliable services as they try to minimize costs.
Nowadays, the remaining cafe owners have diversified their offerings to include selling stationery,M-Pesa and accessories for phones.
it’s true that they were among the visible symbols of the dotcom boom, but cyber cafes are now dying out. Even cafes in towns where mobile penetration is extraordinarily low are seeing the same trend happen there.
Last month the news for the cyber got worse. After going quiet on plans to unveil 4G networks, which provide broadband-speed internet access on phones, Safaricom finally launched its 4G network. This means that slow internet is a thing of the past. Even if you don’t have wifi,you can easily tether your phone to your computer and use your phone’s data to browse on a PC or laptop. All this at a cheaper cost than going to the cyber.
It’s also safe to say that the cyber cafe’s business is migrating to places where people would have traditionally gone to for a coffee or  a meal before the advent of the net, like Javaand KFC,. People don’t need to find a place that is specifically there to offer net access and happens to sell coffee as well. Increasingly, net access is the thing that’s being added to the coffee, not the other way round.
it’s sad that cybers are dying off but sadly, the world has to evolve,
