Customers expecting to find a small, intimate East Village-style cyber cafe were instead greeted with a staggering 18,300 square-foot space featuring rows and rows of flat screen PCs -- 800 in all -- on two floors. And, like Times Square, easyEverything never closes.

Marc Bell, easyEverything's marketing director, explained the reborn concept. "Before we started easyEverything we went around to the older cafes and we saw small shops with 30 screens and dark interiors. You paid at the end of the session and it was expensive to boot," he said. "So we thought if we did this on a much bigger scale, the economics would work in our favor."

Evan Galbraith, owner of New York's first Cyber Cafe, said he wasn't intimidated by the new competition. "The important thing for smaller cafes is that they're creating an overall awareness." Galbraith runs two branches of Cyber Cafe, including one just eight blocks away on 49th Street. "I think it's a testament to the fact that public Internet access is the wave of the future," he said of the bigger competitor.

EasyEverything is charging patrons $1 for five hours of surfing during its opening week, thereafter charging patrons a flexible rate determined by the number of screens in use. So an off-peak charge might be $1 for three hours, but at more crowded times the rate could reach $1 for 15 minutes or more.

But don't be fooled. While simple online access may look cheap, the cafe charges for all the extras, such as color and black-and-white printing services, CD burning, downloads to floppies, Web cams and even access to Microsoft Office 2000. By comparison, Cyber Cafe charges a flat rate of $3.20 for 15 minutes.

"Our strategy is to keep the cost of the basic service down so that we can get more customers in the door," said easyEverything's Bell.

The Times Square easyEverything is the first of several branches opening across the US that British entrepreneur Stelois Haji-Ioannou and his London-based easyGroup have planned. The easyEverything chain runs 15 other jumbo-style cyber cafis across Europe and is planning to expand to several US cities such as San Francisco, Chicago, and Boston.

Tuesday's opening of easyEverything was a high profile affair, with Haji-Ioannou and Hewlett Packard chairman and CEO Carly Fiorina on hand, and a $1.4 million ad campaign splashed across the city's billboards and newspapers.

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Beneath the media blitz, however, the company's European executives are keeping their enthusiasm in check as they launch a massive operation that hasn't quite caught on with a mass American audience.

"A lot of people have said that I'll never make it work in New York," Haji-Ioannou told The New York Times last spring. "But they said that about London, too. Have you ever been to EasyEverything in London at 2 a.m.? It's packed."

But unlike New York, where most people have Internet access at home and at work, many in London still don't own personal computers and those who do face much higher rates for dial-up modems and ISPs than Americans.

And the super-size cafe also faces the hurdle of simple economics. Industry experts peg the rent in that area of Times Square at about $300 per square foot, which could add up to an annual rent in the neighborhood of $5.5 million. That's in addition to other maintenance, staffing and marketing costs.

"They have a much higher risk than we do," Cyber Cafe's Galbraith said of the level of foot traffic easyEverything would have to generate to pay its overhead.

Nonetheless, easyEverything executives are banking on a new look -- and a matter of scale -- to make their American ventures profitable. Company executives expect to see 7,500 customers a day, or approximately 2.5 million logons at the Times Square location within the next six weeks. And though it's no accident that easyEverything has opened in the center of New York's biggest tourist draw, Bell said that he also hopes to see at least 50 percent resident customers.

Either way, one thing is certain. Despite its size, easyEverything may face the same obstacles that every cyber cafe faces in New York and elsewhere. "In the end, it's just like any other business," says Galbraith. "You have to train your staff and keep up your computers. The product you're selling just has to be good."

*Paul Zakrzewski is associate editor of atNewYork.com