Internet Cafe Setup

colt1

Hi
I am thinking about setting up a small internet cafe and I'm just wondering does anybody know what sort of internet connectivity and hardware is been used by other internet cafe's.

Bard

I put a business plan together before but it never got off the ground because the potential investors I had didn't think it was viable - not because my plan wasn't sound - it was... just because they thought it was too late to be getting into that business as 1.> a lot more people are getting online at home and its costing less and less and getting better (look at the speed of cable... thats coming soon...), and 2.> there's enough of them (the café's) out there already... what are you going to offer that's unique?

Think about it... seriously... If you're still interested, it may be worth talking to the folks in some of the café's around town, especially nethouse. Maybe they'd be interested in having you open a new branch of THEIR café - a "franchise", if you will. It could do you good to have a strong name behind you when starting out too.

Also, Websters in Limerick do this type of thing - they help people set up their own café's - they've even gone as far as to arrange the PC's, connectivity, and interior design for people... such as in Coco's in the Belgard Inn, Tallaght. You'll find them at www.websters.ie if you're interested.

Hope this helps.

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Bard
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Baz_

Well as far as I know there are no internet cafes in or around the Blanchardstown area, and with the high volume of shoppers to the Town Centre here, it would be well worth having a look see, about renting a retail unit. Expensive, probably, worth it, maybe but I think so and also thats the risk of business isn't it. So there is a bit of unexplored territory for someone, now just bring it on.

Bard

Yeah - Blanch would be a good spot, now that you mention it - So, for that matter, would Swords... if you're prepared to plough a few hundred grand into it, that is. Big investment, - very little return for a while ( a year to two at least of barely breaking even ). If you're not ready for that, don't do it.

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Bard
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Lump

I wish you'd come to kilkenny, We have a net cafe fair enuf, but its a dual ISDN shared between 5 or 6 computers I think.

John

Bard

I can give you a worse example-... for a time while I was helping to run Websters in Limerick, our only competition was a local computer store which set up its own little so-called Internet Café in-house. Their set-up was laughable... whereas we had 14 P133's and a server sharing a 64K leased line via a star configured high speed RJ45 based ethernet network (and this WAS 4 years ago), they had... wait for it... 4 x 486 DX computers (33Mhz I think) sharing a 14.4K modem via Wingate on a peer to peer coax-based network WITH Windows 3.1 !!!

Hee hee hee...

The standard these days for a kick ass café would surely be a decent sized network (15 plus PC's) of high specification (bare minimum PIII-600 with 128MB RAM) on a 100Mbps ethernet network with an in-house server directly connected via router, etc. to the ISP with at least a 128K leased line, if not better. ... what ya reckon?

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Bard
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