An Empirical Research Study to Analyze the Role of Cyber Cafes on Internet Penetration

摘要

In developing countries, Cyber cafes play important role of Internet access point. Cyber Cafes also helps in bridging the digital divide by providing the cheaper and easy Internet access to all those people who cannot afford to have personal Internet connections. The objective of this paper is to study the role that cyber cafe play in increasing the Internet Penetration and to study why people prefer to use cyber cafe. Paper also focuses on how cyber cafes helps in bridging the Digital Divide by attracting more Internet users. The research was pursued by interviewing number of users (500) of cyber cafe spread over different parts of Delhi. The respondents were chosen in such a way so as to have wider representation of demographics. The information needs for designing the questionnaire were identified through exploratory research by conducting informal interviews and focus group discussions of the cyber cafe users. The data was analyzed using various statistical techniques like, frequency distributions and cross-tabulation. The paper helped in identifying number of issues which act as attraction factors for the internet users at cyber cafes. The paper concludes by providing recommendations to the cyber cafe owners for attracting more internet users.