Ramses fire exposes heavy reliance of private operators on state-owned infrastructure

A fire at Egypt's most critical telecommunications facility this week has caused nationwide network service disruptions.

While the government has downplayed the country's dependence on the Ramses Exchange central data center, the scale of the disruption, affecting all public and private network operators nationwide, has drawn censure from critics who point to the degree of national dependence on infrastructure concentrated in a single building complex in cental Cairo.

The incident killed four people and left 32 injured while triggering an immediate and widespread internet blackout. 

The fire, which sent thick smoke billowing over central Cairo for hours, knocked the building out of operation. The shutdown immediately disrupted phone and internet services, emergency hotlines like those for ambulances and the police, ATMs and digital payment systems as well as some air travel operations.

Communications Minister Amr Talaat, who visited the site, denied on Tuesday that Egypt relies solely on the Ramses Exchange building for telecommunication services. But the minister also said that affected services had to be redistributed across other data centers in the country, which are now acting as a backup network while repairs on Ramses are underway.

No other data center in Egypt matches Ramses’ in scale or in the range of functions it performs within the national telecommunications network that extends to all governorates. 

The exchange building serves as a data center, a storage facility leased by operators, a primary interconnection point between networks and a hub for receiving international calls. While other data centers across Egypt play significant roles within the national grid, with some coming close in terms of function, none rival Ramses. 

Despite Talaat’s assurances, however, that the decline in service connectivity would end in hours, connectivity in Egypt dropped sharply in the aftermath of the fire, with some connectivity still unstable 48 hours later. 

Data from Netblocks, an independent internet monitoring platform, showed that national connectivity fell to 62 percent of ordinary levels immediately after the fire, before dropping further to just 44 percent the next day.

The disruption varied across service providers. Orange was the hardest hit, with connectivity collapsing to just 2 percent of its usual levels, followed by Etisalat operating at 10 percent. Vodafone was less affected at 69 percent, while TE Data, owned by Telecom Egypt, maintained between 82 percent and 91 percent of normal connectivity.

The extent of damage to each telecom company during the fire was directly linked to their level of reliance on the data center, according to Mohamed al-Maghraby, an electrical engineer specializing in network security at a private sector company who spoke to Mada Masr. Both Etisalat and Orange depend on the Ramses center for roughly 80 percent of their operations, making them the most severely affected, he said.

The physical infrastructure that underpins telecom and internet services, including cable lines, exchanges, data centers and switches, is fully owned by Telecom Egypt  — the network provider majority-owned by the government.  

The infrastructure was built and substantially upgraded by the state, especially over the past decade. Billions of Egyptian pounds were allocated to the Communications Ministry to develop the system, including a major shift from copper cables to fiber optic networks for data transmission. Government investment in the sector has reached LE152 billion over the past ten years.

The government bears the full cost of infrastructure investments, while private companies, like Orange, Etisalat and others, lease transmission capacity from it, a former senior official at Telecom Egypt told Mada Masr.

Although private operators are allowed to build and expand their own infrastructure according to their needs under the terms of their licenses, they opt to lease from Telecom Egypt because it’s far cheaper than building their own, especially under oversight that is marred with flaws, according to the senior official.

Private telecom operators entered the market before it was formally regulated, they continued. While private players began operating in the 1990s, a formal legal framework wasn’t introduced until 2003, with the passage of the telecommunications regulation law, which established the National Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (NTRA) to oversee and regulate the sector.

The NTRA does not mandate that service providers build their own infrastructure, nor does it object to companies leasing the infrastructure from another provider. However, it does lay out a set of guidelines meant to ensure the quality and sustainability of services. According to the former senior Telecom Egypt official, companies are expected to lease transmission capacity that exceeds their operational needs — or greater than the number of customers they serve.

Beyond this surplus, companies are also expected to maintain an emergency reserve — unused under normal conditions but available during crises of varying degrees. This reserve is meant to act as an immediate backup that ensures continued data transmission and service stability in the event of damage to primary infrastructure. The closer this reserve capacity is to the company’s actual regular operating volume, the less damage the company is likely to suffer during a disruption, and the better its service continuity.

Maghraby likewise said that there are two levels of contingency planning in the event of network emergencies — the first a standard backup plan, designed to fully absorb common and recurring incidents without noticeably affecting network connectivity.

The second, he said, is a disaster recovery plan for rare, large-scale and unpredictable events — the worst-case scenario. In Egypt’s case, this would require a full replica of the Ramses data center, mirroring its entire capacity and functionality to take over completely if the original were to fail.

However, private providers tend to “skimp” on leasing the extra or emergency capacity required as backup by the NTRA, the former senior  official at Telecom Egypt said. 

This skimping, or that the NTRA overlooks this requirement, is a regulatory oversight. The source argues that flaws in NTRA oversight lie in a central conflict of interest: while the authority is tasked with regulating the sector on behalf of the state, the government is also an active market player through its majority stake in Telecom Egypt. 

This dual role makes regulatory enforcement a sensitive matter. Private companies have repeatedly accused the NTRA of favoring the state-owned company and using its supervisory powers to serve the interests of a competitor in the industry instead.