Egypt proxies

The country is pinned with a suffix in the login. Host, port and password stay the same as for any other country.

A city goes in as a second suffix, but in Egypt it helps less than anywhere else: a spread across networks exists only in Cairo and Giza.

This is the main thing to know about Egypt, and it is not visible from a list of networks. The state owned Telecom Egypt owns virtually the entire physical network in the country, and its competitors lease capacity from it to sell their own services. Vodafone Egypt home broadband runs over Telecom Egypt fibre under a wholesale arrangement.

The practical consequence is direct. Pin Vodafone instead of Telecom Egypt and you change the autonomous system but not the access network: the last mile under both is the same, and one company owns it. If your job needs genuinely independent networks rather than different AS numbers, Egypt does not solve it, and we are not going to pretend it does.

For most jobs this does not matter. For price collection, ad verification and local search results it is enough that the address is Egyptian and residential. The difference starts to matter where the target correlates users by infrastructure rather than by network number.

Telecom Egypt is present in 110 cities, that is 91 percent. For comparison: the OTE group covers 84 percent in Greece, Slovak Telekom 42 percent in Slovakia. Egypt holds the record in our catalogue.

In 64 cities out of 121 Telecom Egypt is the only network in the pool at all. The cities without it number eleven, and they are mostly districts of Cairo, Giza and Alexandria such as Heliopolis, Imbaba and Montaza.

In total, 74 cities out of 121 have exactly one network available, whichever it is. So choosing a carrier in Egypt is mostly a choice between Telecom Egypt and Telecom Egypt.

No Egyptian city gives more than six. Cairo has six, Giza five, and Alexandria, Mansoura, Tanta, Zagazig, Banha, Al Haram and Maadi four each. After that it is three and below.

Compare the scale with the neighbours in our catalogue: Lahore holds 57 networks, Lima 79, Caracas 40. Egypt, with its population, gives six in the capital. That is a property of the market rather than of our pool, and it follows directly from the previous section.

Two entries in the pool are worth knowing in advance: the network of the American University in Cairo and the Egyptian Universities Network in Tanta. An address on either does not look like a home connection and is identified as educational, so pinning a carrier blind by name is a bad idea here.

We checked twenty well known Egyptian domains from Europe with a full browser header set. Fifteen opened: Amazon.eg, Dubizzle, Aqarmap, Talabat, B.TECH, the NBE, Banque Misr and CIB banks, the ETA tax authority, the Youm7 and Al-Masry Al-Youm newspapers, Ahram in English, and the Telecom Egypt, Vodafone and Orange carrier sites.

Five closed. Four of them are bot protection: Jumia Egypt, Wuzzuf and 2B answer through Cloudflare with a cf-mitigated header set to challenge, and Hatla2ee returns 403. The fifth is the egypt.gov.eg portal, which does not answer at the connection level.

So there is no mass country barrier here. An Egyptian residential address is needed against bot protection on the trading platforms and against the target reading address class, not in order to reach the country at all.

A separate note on something usually left unsaid. Two large Egyptian sites serve an ordinary request a page with almost no text: Amazon.eg returned us two thousand bytes and one word of visible text, Dubizzle twenty four kilobytes and zero words. The content is assembled in the browser.

So an Egyptian address will open the door, but the data will not be behind it until you run a real browser that executes scripts. This is not a property of the proxy and not something a different address can fix.

Plan browser based collection for such targets rather than curl, and budget traffic accordingly: a full page load in a browser weighs tens of times more than bare HTML.

We counted characters on live Egyptian pages, because Arabic sites are usually feared for their script. The result went against the expectation: we found no Arabic-Indic digits at all. Youm7 carries 358 European digits and not one Arabic-Indic, B.TECH 452 and none, Aqarmap nine and none.

We found no bidirectional control characters on any of the pages we checked either. So you will not need separate logic here for converting digits or for parsing direction marks.

What you do need: correct handling of right to left Arabic text, and the knowledge that the markup is honestly labelled ar with rtl direction. Plus English versions on some sites, Talabat for instance being labelled English outright.

The Egyptian pound was sharply devalued several times starting in 2022. For price monitoring that means a series stretched across those dates cannot be compared directly: a change in the number on the price tag may be explained entirely by the exchange rate rather than by a decision of the shop.

The practical conclusion is simple. Record the observation date and the rate on that date alongside the price, rather than converting after the fact at the current rate. Otherwise you get a handsome chart that describes a currency rather than a market.

In Cairo, Giza and Alexandria connections hold acceptably. Across the rest of the country 74 cities out of 121 hold one network, and when a line drops there is nothing to replace it with inside the city.

On size, plainly: seven networks, of which four are usable for our purposes. That is the smallest working set among all the countries in the catalogue, and under load you will come back to the same addresses very quickly. Egypt suits targeted checks rather than bulk.

The short fork.

It is counted in traffic. A dollar per gigabyte.

Egypt runs site blocking on the carrier side. The rights organisation AFTE, which maintains a public list, counted 558 blocked sites and links as of August 2022; we found no more recent public count, so we quote the date along with the figure. The measurement methodology is described in a joint OONI and AFTE report.

Two things follow. First: an Egyptian exit shows you a filtered internet, and if you are checking whether your landing page reaches a local audience, that has to be done from inside the country. Second, and less obvious: the dominant carrier is state owned, meaning the network and the filtering share one owner.

A proxy changes none of what you are allowed to do. It changes only which country the request appears to come from.

Confirm the exit is Egyptian, that the session holds, and that a target with a bot check lets you in from a residential address while it does not from an ordinary one.