Egypt has advanced by five places in the Ookla Speedtest for internet speed in 2020, according to Minister of Communications and Information Technology Amr Talaat.
Egypt ranked fourth in Africa and eighth in the Arab world in the Internet speed index, in which the average Internet speed increased to 45.9 Mbps in 2020 from 6.5 Mbps in 2019.
This improvement was attributed to the plan of the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology to develop the Internet in Egypt over the past two years.
The Minister said that about EGP 60bn has been invested to achieve this development, pointing to the ministry’s continuing to develop the infrastructure to expand the base of beneficiaries of Internet services within the national project “Decent Life”, through which it aims to connect one million homes with fiber-optic cables as a first stage. The investments are estimated to be EGP 5.8bn. The efficiency and stability of the service and its governance will also be enhanced to ensure a service worthy of users is provided and establish the infrastructure necessary to build a digital Egypt.
The Ministry of Communications has also improved the quality of communications services by offering 80 MHz in the frequency space of 2,600 MHz, with revenues of $1.170bn.
The number of mobile towers was also doubled from 600 to 1,200 in the first half of 2021, with a focus on the governance of telecommunications services. Simplified procedures have been applied since June 2020 to the number transfer service and the elimination of spam messages.
At the end of last October, the Minister of Communications announced the start of the third phase of developing the fixed internet infrastructure in Egypt. The ministry is currently working to contract with an international expert house to implement the third phase of this development project in Egypt.