[huridocs-tech] Free Internet access introduced in Egypt

Egyptians Flock to New Net Plan
By Mats A. Palmgren
Wired News

2:00 a.m. June 25, 2002 PDT

CAIRO -- Egyptians are spending more time on the Internet since the
Internet became free -- free of subscription fees that is, because
users are still paying the nominal cost of 20 cents per hour for
their Internet calls.

That's good news for the ISPs, which collect 70 percent of the call
revenues from the phone company.

The new agreement was brokered by the Ministry of Communication and
Information Technology (MCIT), which figured the state-owned
operator, Telecom Egypt (TE), ought to play a part in a national
drive to increase Egypt's online presence.

Access is vital because only one million out of 69 million Egyptian
citizens use the Internet, and as a developing country, Egypt risks
falling further behind as the global economy becomes increasingly
knowledge-based.

"The difference will not be between the rich and poor, but between
the fast and slow, those who are plugged in and those who are
isolated," a speaker from the World Bank said at a conference on the
theme of the digital divide in Cairo earlier this month.

In the old model, ISPs had a hard time making ends meet by selling
monthly subscriptions priced at $4 for unlimited hours. Since
salaries are low, on average $100 per month, many users were sharing
one account.

Now, when users no longer take turns, traffic has increased. "We have
doubled the number of user hours and I know several other companies
did the same," says Khaled Bichara, CEO of Link.Net, the largest ISP.

"We call it the free Internet, but it's not free, it's the price of
the phone call," said Ahmed Nazif, minister of the MCIT. "It gives
you wider access possibilities because all telephone lines have
Internet capability, just by dialing a phone number, without having
to go somewhere to get a subscription."

Not all ISPs have enjoyed such a tremendous bump. "For the market at
large it is definitely an increase, but the new model did not create
a boom as many had expected," says Hossam Saleh, sales and marketing
director at the national operator's own ISP, TE Data.

Since users can connect without registering with the ISP, it is not
known if more Egyptians are online, "but of course there are more
users also, I cannot believe all our old clients have doubled their
time online," Bichara says.

The revenue-sharing model has enabled the ISPs to upgrade Egypt's
Internet infrastructure by placing their own equipment in the
operator's exchanges. Since the launch in January, the number of ISPs
has almost doubled and is now 106.

Like the world's largest Arabic newspaper, Al-Ahram, which turned
itself into Egypt's second-largest ISP by placing boxed ads with its
dial-up number frequently on the front-page, most new ISPs don't have
their own technology but rent access from an Internet wholesaler.

The MCIT envisions Egypt becoming an Internet hub in the Arab world,
a market with 290 million people with a common language, religion and
traditions, but other obstacles remain.

"Media hype might have raised awareness and increased the market, but
the main deterrents to growth are PC penetration, lack of local
content and computer illiteracy," says Magda Habib, marketing
director at Raya Holding, owner of ISP Starnet.

The MCIT is already cooperating with the private sector to provide
computer training on all levels to 100,000 students every year.

Starting this month, a joint government and private sector company
will manufacture low-cost PCs in Egypt that can be paid for in small
installments via the phone bill.

Revenue sharing might also fuel the production of local content, much
needed to make more Egyptians interested in the Internet, says Saleh.

"It is the beauty of it, we can make money from both traffic to the
sites and from the services on the sites," says Bichara.

Today, foreign news sites and chat rooms where people can meet
without social restrictions are highly popular.

So is pornography, but "it's changing from a high percentage to a
medium percentage of the total Web traffic," says Saleh. "The market
is becoming more sophisticated and there's other multimedia on the
Net now for those who just wanted to see something moving," he added.

Unlike the less-populated but richer countries Saudi Arabia and the
United Arab Emirates, which only last year overtook Egypt as having
the largest Arab Internet population, Egypt is not trying to restrict
the Internet.

But security police are monitoring chat rooms and local sites deemed
immoral or damaging to the state or religion have been shut down. A
few people have been imprisoned for soliciting sex on the Net.

In most of these cases claims Saleh, it is the hosting company that
made the report to the police, since there is a social consensus and
no business wants to be associated with this kind of material.


Copyright © 1994-2002 Wired Digital Inc. All rights reserved.

*** References from this document ***

[orig] http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,52993,00.html




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