Government denies involvement, calls it a "rumor"

Oct 21, 2015 12:16 GMT  ·  By

Egypt’s National Telecommunications Regulation Authority (NTRA) has quietly implemented a ban on VoIP (Voice over IP) services inside the country's borders.

The blockade slowly started being implemented by the country's telcos and ISPs early this month, to the surprise of many unsuspecting Egyptians.

Affected services include popular Web and mobile applications like Skype, WhatsApp, Facebook and Viber, but other less-known tools could be affected as well.

Despite the apparent ban, Egyptian authorities deny any involvement

Local independent e-paper Egyptian Streets has the inside story of how things unfolded, and describes a situation where the NTRA issued the ban, but later publicly denied it, saying this was only a "rumor."

Calls to customer support services for various Egyptian telcos have revealed that the companies were acting on an order that came from the agency, despite the NTRA's deceiving public statement.

At first, the blame fell on telecommunications companies that wanted to prevent further losses due to a shift to VoIP calls to the detriment of classic calling methods and SMS texting.

Egypt has a long history of repressive and abusive control of Internet services

Later, after the spirits calmed down, rumors that connected the most recent ban to the government Internet surveillance program claimed the ban on VoIP voice calling services was put into place because of the difficulty the country's surveillance agencies had in monitoring this types of communications.

Basically, the government decided to block whatever it could not tap into. At the time of this article's publication, the ban was still in place.

This is not the first time that Egypt has banned VoIP calls, the country having implemented a similar (short-lived) ban in March 2010. Besides Egypt, other countries, such as Belize, Brazil, China, Jordan, Kuwait, Mexico, North Korea, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, implement similar VoIP bans.