Egypt Daily News – Despite the dramatic fire that broke out recently at the Ramses central exchange in Cairo, 70% of Egypt’s home internet services continued to function normally, according to the National Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (NTRA). Egypt Daily News will vouch for that.
Eng. Mohamed Ibrahim, Head of Community Engagement at the NTRA, explained that Egypt’s telecom services are strategically distributed across multiple central exchanges nationwide. This distribution, he said, allows for a swift redirection of services in the event of localized failures such as fires or technical outages.
“When the fire occurred at the Ramses exchange, the system was quickly reloaded onto alternative exchanges to maintain continuity,” Ibrahim said. “We always leave capacity in the network infrastructure to ensure services can be rerouted when necessary.”
At the time of the incident, Egypt had over 11 million home internet subscriptions. Ibrahim confirmed that only 30% of those were temporarily affected, and within four days, that number dropped significantly to between 1% and 3% across all telecom providers.
He emphasized that immediate priority was given to critical services impacted by the fire—particularly financial services that rely heavily on uninterrupted telecom networks. These were the first to be rerouted and stabilized as part of the emergency response.
As for personal and residential internet services, the pace of recovery varied slightly between companies. However, Ibrahim assured viewers that the majority of services have now returned to normal, with only a few isolated pockets still experiencing minor disruptions.
“The vast majority of users are now back online without issue,” he said, “and the remaining issues are being resolved with urgency.”
