Telecom Egypt

company · earth · economy · Egypt

The Egyptian state-controlled incumbent telecommunications operator, and the owner and operator of the landing stations and terrestrial routes that make up the Egyptian cable crossing. Its position is unusual in the industry: most carriers own cables, whereas Telecom Egypt owns a piece of geography that other people's cables must traverse, and it sells transit across it. That has made it both indispensable and contentious — the transit charges levied on systems crossing Egypt have been a standing complaint of consortium members for years, and the search for alternatives, from routes around the Cape to terrestrial paths through the Gulf and Turkey to the Arctic, is driven as much by that pricing power as by physical risk. The company has also built cables of its own along the corridor it controls. It is included in this pack as the clearest single instance of the general rule that infrastructure chokepoints become commercial and political instruments as soon as they are recognised as chokepoints.