Employees like freedom to surf at work

It should come as no surprise that most Americans with Internet access at work do some personal Web surfing on the job. A new survey finds that half of them would rather give up their morning coffee than forgo that ability.

Maps, news and weather are the chief nonwork-related sites visited.

A quarter of employees watch or listen to streaming media at least once a week from work, and 18 percent have downloaded and stored nonwork music, photos and video clips, according to a telephone-based survey sponsored by Websense Inc., which makes software that helps companies filter and monitor Internet use.

Africa charges more for Net

African Internet users pay on average 90 times what Americans pay, crippling efforts by the world’s poorest continent to become competitive, a senior Kenyan official said.

Internet users in America pay $20 for one gigabyte of data per month, but people in Africa pay about $1,800 for the same amount of data, according to Kenya’s Minister for Information and Communication Mutahi Kagwe.

That’s partly because the infrastructure-strapped continent spends millions of dollars every year to route data and voice traffic from one African country to another through Europe or North America, Kagwe said.

Only about 1.5 percent of Africa’s estimated 906 million people are connected to the Internet. By contrast, more than 70 percent of people in Hong Kong are online, Kagwe said.

Sites tops for travel

Frequent travelers are no doubt familiar with the online travel agencies like Expedia, Orbitz and Travelocity. Lesser known are the travel search engines that check multiple sites at once and can uncover Web specials that the big three online agencies might miss.

An Associated Press reporter checked out four of them – FareChase from Yahoo Inc., Kayak.com, Mobissimo and SideStep – and found that the search engines typically gave the best fares. That’s because the agencies add a service fee while the search engines usually take a user to airlines’ Web sites for direct booking without fees.

Yahoo (http://farechase.yahoo.com) appeared to give the best fares most of the time, although the search engine rounds prices down, making them appear $1 cheaper. Factoring that in, Kayak.com ( www.kayak.com) most often had the best fare – six times – while Yahoo came up best five times. Mobissimo ( www.mobissimo.com) was on top four times, and SideStep Inc. ( www.sidestep.com) tied for first once.

Still, online travel agencies’ fares are only a few dollars pricier after fees are added, and on some trips, they turned up cheaper fares than what the search engines found.