History of the Internet in Egypt
Internet started in Egypt in 1993 with a cable connection to
France of a 9.6 kbps bandwidth to the Egyptian Universities Network
(EUN) and the Cabinet Information & Decision Support Center (IDSC)
with the National telephone organization (predecessor of Telecom
Egypt) providing the infrastructure. The number of users at that
time was estimated to be between 2000 and 3000.
In 1994 the Egyptian domain (.eg) was divided into 3 sub domains,
.eun.eg for the Egyptian Universities Network, .sci.eg serving the
Scientific research institutes and .gov.eg for Governmental bodies.
the IDSC acted as Internet service provider. Digital data access was
provided to the end user using digital multiplexors.
Interconnectivity has been drastically improved by the setup of a
number of digital multiplexors as the first digital backbone for
data communication in the country. Fiber international connectivity
was made available on SEMEWE-2 or satellite via Intelsat.
In 1996, the gateway speeds have been increased by nearly 20
times. The user numbers have increased to 20,000 users. IDSC/RITSEC
started to provide connectivity to private service providers under
the .com.eg domain, while some providers had their own international
gateways. ISPs had reached 40 by the end of 1996 providing Internet
services to end users in Cairo, Alexandria, Sinai and the Red sea
area.
In 2000 ISDN service was introduced in Egypt. ISDN is an added
feature to the existing normal telephone line. It converts the
normal, Analog and slow telephone line to Digital , fast and
reliable telephone line. Available speeds were 64kbps and 128kbps.
With the implementation of DSL technology in Egypt many of
businesses and end users changed their subscriptions to utilize the
high speed and affordable new service. Today speeds of up to 24Mbps
are available to customers in their homes by many ISPs. The largest
of these ISPs are TEdata and LinkdotNet which are two shareholding
companies providing Internet services to subscribers in all regions
in Egypt.
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