Telecom Egypt and ICANN Activate Second Root Server in Africa, Boosting Internet Resilience and Speed
Telecom Egypt and The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) have signed an agreement for, and activated, the second ICANN Managed Root Server (IMRS) installation in Africa, hosted in Cairo, Egypt.
The new IMRS installation is being hosted within Telecom Egypt’s Regional Data Hub (RDH) – the company’s largest, international, certified Tier III data center. Located inside the Smart Village Business District in west Cairo, RDH is connected with a state-of-the-art fully meshed network providing access to 14 submarine cables, with this number set to increase to 18 by 2025.
Hosting the new IMRS installation in Cairo will benefit Egypt by improving Internet user experience and reducing the risk of being taken offline as a result of a cyberattack. The installation of the IMRS in Egypt, in addition to the one in Kenya, will add crucial capacity to support growth in Internet use across the African continent. This, in turn, is expected to drive economic expansion and create opportunities for Africa’s potential Internet users. Furthermore, with two separate IMRS cluster locations on the continent, as well as higher bandwidth and data processing capacity, the risk of the Internet going down because of a hashtag#cyberattack will be significantly reduced.
The new IMRS installation will ensure that Internet queries from Africa can be answered within the region, rather than relying on networks and servers in other parts of the world. The cluster will improve the user experience in Egypt and across the region, reducing latency and the time it takes for a website to load, especially during peak Internet usage periods. This will bring immediate benefits to Internet users not only in Egypt, but across the African continent. The new IMRS installation will also reduce the impact of a potential cyberattack on the continent or that of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) cyberattacks.
Mohamed Nasr, Managing Director, and Chief Executive Officer
The IMRS deployment in Cairo represents a significant advancement in enhancing Africa’s technical infrastructure. Egypt’s strategic position as a digital influencer in the region is of paramount importance. With this second IMRS installation in Africa, our commitment to the Coalition for Digital Africa project in the digital transformation in Africa remains unwavering. This achievement strengthens Internet infrastructure, not only in Egypt, but across the entire region. Before the IMRS installations in Africa, most of African Root Zone DNS queries were served by IMRS instances outside the continent. After the implementation of two IMRS installations, the distribution has shifted as most of the queries will be served inside Africa.
Sally Costerton, Interim President and CEO, ICANN
