Internet café is also known as cybercafé. In Singapore, gaming is popular at internet café. Internet café with gaming is known as LAN (Local Area Network) gaming center. This kind of internet café will connect few computers together to support multiplayer gaming.

However, smartphone with data plan and new technology – cloud gaming system such as Steam has caused a decline in the demand of a LAN gaming centre.

Another type of internet café is internet only café. Usually this type of café has some features of the business centre.  Service commonly provide in this type of internet café are printing, scanning, faxing and photocopy.

Our internet café has been running since 1999 (2016: 17 years) from a LAN gaming centre to internet only café.

In 1999, we intend to run an internet cafe with fax services to suit both Singaporean and foreigners' needs. Unfortunately, internet access was too expensive and too slow to connect.

Hence, we chose to run LAN gaming centre instead until price of commercial internet access was of our target price or below and had reached an ideal speed.

Fortunately, the price and the speed of the internet access had reached our target in 2003. We began to change our business model to our initial idea.

Now, we provide internet services with documents printing, scanning, photocopy, burning DVD, files transferring and faxing. We also print business cards. All these indicate that we provide a low cost business centre services.

Internet café will become a thing of the past in Singapore, as smartphone with data plan can access internet anytime anywhere. But, internet café is still an essential. Think about it, smartphone cannot provide proper scanning feature and you have no plan of printer investment. Of course, people may need other services from internet café beside printing and scanning.

Printer is a bad investment for people who seldom use. Print just a few pages and then few months later try to print another few more pages; unfortunately ink dries up. Imagine you only print 6 pages and the ink cartridge costs you more than $30.

People who rarely print will also think that laser printer cartridge is too expensive.

Most customers print pictures and documents like flight itinerary, e-shopping (qoo10.com.sg, groupon.com.sg, deal.com.sg) voucher, tenancy agreement, emails etc. in our internet café.

Some people may exceed the data plan quota. It will be too expensive to continue to use. They may need an internet café for them to continue skyping.

Internet café could also be a substitution to a man who urgently need to use internet and/or computer for word processing, spreadsheet or create powerpoint presentation but realize his smartphone hangs and/or his computer is damaged.

Some company’s web portal cannot be opened by using smartphone. Some videos on web cannot be streamed using a smartphone. Internet café at this moment will come into your mind.

Although it is common to install office apps into your smartphone, you will find time consuming in typing out documents like resume. It is time consuming to send a long email too with the small touch-screen button. At this moment, you will think of internet café.

Some infrequent internet users do not have a phone with data plan. Tapping on free wifi may be too slow to use. Hence, they always source for internet café whenever they need it.

All this indicate that the demand for internet cafe is still not able to be totally replace by smartphone.