Egypt’s biggest Internet Exchange runs on 18 networks

Egypt’s main internet exchange moves nearly as much traffic as the biggest exchanges in sub-Saharan Africa, and it does so with 18 member networks. Nairobi’s KIXP needs 143 to fill its fabric. NAPAfrica in Johannesburg has 605.

That gap is the most interesting aspect of EG-IX, and it is no accident. It follows directly from what the exchange is: a carrier-owned platform built to attract a small number of very large content networks, rather than a community exchange assembled from a national ISP base.

What can be verified today

EG-IX publishes live traffic on its own site. On 7 September 2026 it showed 528.80 Gb/s flowing and a peak of 722.19 Gb/s over the preceding day, with average traffic in each direction of about 443 Gb/s.

AMS-IX has separately put the longer arc at 250 Gb/s to 875 Gb/s of peak traffic in under two years, describing EG-IX as one of the largest exchanges in the Middle East and North Africa. That 875 figure is a peak across the year rather than a current reading, and it has not appeared in a formal company statement, so it is best read alongside the exchange’s own live counter rather than in place of it.

Either way, the direction is not in dispute. What the traffic curve shows, though, is not steady accumulation. It sits flat through most of 2025, then steps up twice in the first half of 2026 and holds. Curves shaped like that are usually the record of individual large networks turning up and lighting ports, not of a broad base growing together.

Eighteen networks, three terabits of ports

The membership is published through routing data rather than by the exchange, and it is small enough to list in full. Across 31 ports, the members hold roughly 3 Tbps of provisioned capacity, which is three to four times the traffic the platform actually peaks at, and every port carries IPv6 as well as IPv4.

Five of the 18 are Egyptian: Telecom Egypt itself, its TE Data subsidiary, Vodafone Egypt, Etisalat Egypt and Link Egypt. Two are Jordanian carriers. One is a root name server. The remaining ten are global content, CDN and cloud platforms.

Read as a market: an exchange where international content comes to reach Egyptian eyeballs, and where the Egyptian eyeball networks are represented mostly by the incumbent and the two mobile operators. It is not yet a place where Egypt’s smaller ISPs meet.

A different kind of exchange

Most of Africa’s large exchanges are neutral in both structure and name. KIXP is run by TESPOK, an industry association of Kenyan operators. JINX, CINX, and DINX belong to INX-ZA, which is run by the ISP association of South Africa. NAPAfrica is operated by Teraco, a data centre business that sells space to everyone and competes with no one.

EG-IX is a different arrangement. It is owned by Telecom Egypt, sits inside Telecom Egypt’s Regional Data Hub at Smart Village in west Cairo, and runs on AMS-IX’s IX-as-a-Service platform, which provides switching, operations, and brand discipline without taking ownership. The incumbent carrier owns the meeting place; a foreign exchange operator runs it.

This has real consequences rather than merely symbolic ones. Policy at a member-owned exchange is set by the members, who are also the competitors; at a carrier-owned one it is set by the owner. A content network weighing a port cares mostly about reach and cost, and Egypt’s reach runs through Telecom Egypt either way, which is why the content side of the table filled up quickly.

A smaller Egyptian ISP faces a different calculation. Joining puts its traffic inside a competitor’s building, and the traffic it most wants to exchange locally is with networks that are largely absent. The 18-member roster is what that calculation looks like in aggregate.

None of this makes the exchange less useful. Keeping Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and the large CDNs on Egyptian soil shortens paths for every Egyptian user, whichever ISP they buy from, and Telecom Egypt’s 14 subsea cable systems at the same site make Cairo a plausible interconnection point for the wider region. It does mean that EG-IX and KIXP are doing different jobs, and comparing their member counts without saying so is misleading.

Where it sits in Africa

By members, EG-IX is not close to the continent’s largest exchanges. By traffic, it is in the company. NAPAfrica remains far ahead on both counts, but the Egyptian platform reaching three quarters of a terabit at peak in four years puts it among the busiest north of the equator.

It also confirms a pattern tech.africa has tracked since the big three exchanges began expanding into Africa: the growth is increasingly delivered by international operators running platforms on local soil, rather than by local associations building their own. AMS-IX runs fabrics in Lagos and Djibouti. LINX runs Nairobi and Mombasa. That model brings capacity quickly, and it moves the governance offshore.

The counterweight is that community exchanges keep growing too, and they grow where the smaller networks are. KIXP interconnected its two Mombasa data centres this year, Kinshasa’s KINIX expanded across two buildings, and CINX added Cape Town sites without any of them adding a terabit of content ports.

What to watch

Three things will show whether EG-IX becomes an Egyptian exchange as well as an international one.

The first is whether Egyptian ISPs, beyond the incumbent and mobile operators, appear on the roster. The second is whether the traffic curve starts climbing between the steps, which would indicate the existing members growing rather than new ones arriving. The third is the subsea count: Telecom Egypt said at launch that the site would reach 18 cable systems, and each one strengthens the case for regional networks to interconnect in Cairo rather than in Marseille or Amsterdam.

For now, EG-IX is a fast, well-provisioned exchange that a small number of very large networks find worth joining. Whether it becomes the place where Egypt’s internet meets itself is another question, and the membership list is where the answer will appear first.