Baher Esmat Blog

Over the past couple of weeks there has been a lot of debate within the Internet user community of Egypt in relation to the new ADSL prices that have been announced by the National Telecommunication Regulatory Authority (NTRA). NTRA announced that the monthly subscription for a 256kbps would go down from 95EGP (17USD) to 45EGP (8USD), with a limitation to either 2GB (Gigabyte) download per month or 60 hours use per month. NTRA added that they would not set any price schemes for speed connections higher than 256kbps and would leave it to the ISPs to decide.

The news was quite controversial because NTRA was not clear enough with regard to the current ADSL offerings that are unlimited in terms of the download capacity but are higher in price. Few days after, the Minister of CIT called for a meeting with NTRA and the ISP CEOs and agreed to "liberalize" the ADSL prices and leave it entirely to the ISPs to decide on the prices, while confirming that both the limited and unlimited offerings will be available. So the end user will have the choice as to the best offer that suits his usage.

As one of those who followed the story in the media, through blogs, and from talking to several people about it, it was clear to me that there was a communication gap between the industry represented in the government and ISPs, and the users. The announcement of the 45EGP offer came following a process of brainstorming and negotiation between NTRA and the ISPs (Industry), but where was the stake of the users (Community) in this process? The users were very excited when they heard in the news about the expected 50% reductions in ADSL and couldn't wait to see these reductions come true! Then few days later, the same users were so disappointed to know that the new offering will be restricted. Some of those users expressed their frustrations through various online forums, blogs, and mailing lists, and although I was personally unhappy about much of what I've read on those forums and blogs in terms of language and rational, I was empathetic to some of the points raised there.

But my key point here is to get the whole Community to participate in the process. That is not an easy task though there might be some straightforward steps to start with.  Civil society is the keyword here. We need to bring associations concerned with Internet, technology, consumer protection, etc., together with researchers and academics to the table. Egypt was one of the first countries that had a chapter for the Internet Society in the mid 90's that played a major role in setting the scenes for privatizing the Internet services in the country. The Internet Society of Egypt has been dormant for quite sometime but I'm hopeful that it will be revived soon and resume its activities in an open, collaborative and effective manner.