Internet Communication in China

One of the most cost effective way of communication in China is internet, the best place to get the internet connection must be internet cafes as hotels charge high rate.According to Ministry of Culture of China, China had 113,000 Internet cafes by the end of April 2005, so it will not be hard to find a internet cafe in China except very remote areas.

The Internet Cafes in China mostly come in two flavors. There’s the massive acre-sized professionally set up ones where you get a card which you insert into the computer to unlock it, or with a password written on it that they use to track your usage time. These places will have more than a hundred computers — sometimes hundreds, and run 24 hours a day. Then there’s the smaller “family owned” kind which are more common on the South East Asia tourist circuit, where there might be between 10 and 50 computers, and they keep track of you based on which computer you were sitting at.

Keep in mind that both flavors are:

1. Probably one of the cheapest forms of entertainment per-hour that you can find. Many places cost 3-4 yuan per hour ($0.37-$0.50 USD). If you consider the people making money playing games, it can even be a money-making venture to live in an internet cafe.
2. …therefore full of kids and young people smoking, chatting online, watching movies (which are stored across the different computers, or maybe on some file server) and playing games.

Almost all the computers in the internet cafes run windows (98, 2000, and XP are all seen).