(AFP Photo)
By Mohamed Alaa El Din
The board of directors at the National Telecommunication Regulatory Authority (NTRA) has met under the auspices of Minister of Communications and Information Technology Khaled Negm.
They agreed that the NTRA’s Executive President, Hesham El-Alaily, will be assigned to negotiate with the companies that provide wired internet services to provide low cost offers at speeds of 1MB as well as 2MB.
Last month, Negm met with the “Internet Revolution” movement’s members to discuss their demands. These included reducing internet prices, increasing speeds to start with a minimum 1MB instead of 512 kilobytes, in addition to reconsidering the policy of fair usage.
They also demanded improving service quality, and investigating the possibility of cancelling the application of the fair usage policy on services.
Hesham El-Alaily assured that he will negotiate with enterprises regarding the necessity of providing suitable and creative offers to spread internet service, which benefits users, the state and enterprises. Along with the companies, they will fight against illegal internet cables, which are considered among the main reasons for the slow and bad internet services.
The Minister of Communications promised to work with new prices and speeds by mid-May, which did not happen because only one company, TE Data, owned by Telecom Egypt (TE), submitted a low price offer to the NTRA.
The other service providers demanded that TE reduce prices of renting infrastructure and solve technical problems that accompanied the replacement of copper cables with fibre optic cables, which lost them their clients to the benefit of TE Data. The providers said these are their demands in order to be able to offer low-price services.
