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Al-Ahram Weekly 15 - 21 July 1999 Issue No. 438 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 15 - 21 July 1999 Issue No. 438
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Features Travel Living Sports Time Out Chronicles People Cartoons Letters Café connections
By Shaimaa LabibFor centuries, Cairo's cafés offered a place for people to meet, drink tea, listen to music, play backgammon or chess and smoke shisha.
Then several private Information Technology (IT) companies decided all that was going to change. Egypt discovered the joys of cyberspace socialising, and no one has looked back since.
A cybercafé provides food, beverages and a world of entertainment through personal computers connected to the World Wide Web. Customers are charged by the hour or fraction of an hour for using the Internet. Cybercafés were first introduced in the United States in 1991 and, by September of 1997, there were an estimated one thousand worldwide.
photo: Sherif Sonbol
Options at some cybercafés include the use of color printers and fax machines, international phone lines and Internet training courses. Some venues even offer annual or monthly subscription packages at a discount. Customers browse or chat while listening to MTV or watching sports channels.
The Internet market has boomed since its introduction to Egypt a few years ago by the Cabinet Information Decision Support Centre (IDSC). Egypt currently has about 40,000 Internet subscribers, increasing at an annual rate of 30 per cent.
Internet Egypt, jointly owned by businessman Ahmed Bahgat, chairman of Bahgat Group, and Mona Qaddah, director of the computer centre at the American University in Cairo, was the first Internet Service Provider (ISP) in the country to pioneer cybercafés, with ten successful cafés established so far.
According to Hisham Abdel-Fattah, marketing manager at Internet Egypt, the company's decision to open cybercafés was a response to increased demand for Internet connections. The great advantage, of course, is that customers don't have to buy a computer to get on-line.
"We charge only LE10 per hour. Most of the young people visiting the café either study computer science or work with computers. The other customers look for entertainment sites on the Web," Abdel-Fattah says.
He confirms that "Internet ethics" bind all the customers. "We make our customers sign a code of ethics before they get a connection," he explains. Customers thereby promise not to visit sites specialising in pornography or violence -- such as on-line arms distributors.
Khaled Sherif, a researcher who is preparing his PhD, said that the Internet has made it much easier for him to finish his research. "I spent more than four years preparing my master's thesis because I had little access to reference works. This is no longer a problem. The café provides me with an opportunity to access the Internet at a low cost and browse sites that could be useful for my research," Sherif says. He and many other customers, however, are among the lucky few: the overwhelming majority of cybercafés are located in Cairo and Alexandria.
Speed and reliability play a role in encouraging people to visit the cafés since they use leased telephone lines for connecting to the Internet. A leased line provides 24-hour access to the Internet, while a dial-up connection requires that the user subscribe to an ISP, which imposes a monthly time limit.
"I have a computer and an Internet connection at home, but I prefer the café since it has a leased line, which is faster and more reliable than the dial-up connection I have at home. Besides, I have a monthly limit of 15 hours' use at home but there is no time restriction in the café," says Hanan Abdel-Tawab, an assistant professor at Cairo University's Faculty of Commerce.
Beside offering an Internet connection, some cybercafés lease their computers to organisations for staff training in Internet use.
"Several Internet courses were conducted by UNESCO and UNICEF, using our computers in the café to train their personnel," says Dina Labib, marketing manager at Way Out, a medium-sized holding company that offers leased or dial-up Internet connections and the construction of cybercafés. Labib adds that providing Internet services is very profitable since so many people are interested. "We have customer support personnel who monitor customers' activities, help newcomers find their way through the Internet and introduce useful sites," she says.
Cybercafés are not all about business, however. Some Internet users planning a holiday have found appealing deals offered by travel companies on the Web. Riham Shawqi, a sales manager, went on vacation once "after selecting one of the travel offers I found on the site of an international travel company. Since then, I browse the sites of different travel companies besides checking my e-mail." Shawqi believes that, if more Egyptian travel companies were to follow suit and set up their own web sites, they would attract more customers.
Among the factors that push droves of young Internet users, even those with computers and accounts at home, out to the cybercafés are family restrictions. Shadi Kamal, a university student, describes chatting on the Internet at home as "a nightmare. I've made many friends in chat-rooms, but that doesn't suit my parents. Whenever they find out that I am chatting on the Internet, they start asking me all sorts of questions: who I am chatting with, their nationality and religion, and what topics we discuss. They are afraid I might be influenced by the people I chat with," he says in exasperation.
Kamal does not want his parents to control his relationships, so he goes to the cybercafé and chats with his friends "in peace".
Cybercafés are also gaining favour with youngsters who browse entertainment sites or play computer games. "My friends and I like sites that have intelligence tests. We like to bet on who is going to score the highest. It's so much fun -- at least, it's more fun than watching television programmes," says Ahmed Said, a 14-year-old student.
