Telecom Egypt and ICANN sign an agreement and activate Africa’s second ICANN Managed Root Server.

Telecom Egypt and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) inked an agreement and activated the second ICANN Managed Root Server (IMRS) installation in Africa, hosted in Cairo, Egypt, yesterday.

The new IMRS installation is housed in Telecom Egypt's Regional Data Hub (RDH), the company's largest international, Tier III data centre.

An IMRS cluster is a large installation of multiple servers that have a large service or processing capacity. They are usually commissioned with very high bandwidth to deal with heavy traffic or spikes in traffic.

In a statement Telecom Egypt said RDH is located within the Smart Village Business District in west Cairo and is connected to a fully meshed network that provides access to 14 submarine cables, with this number expected to expand to 18 by 2025.

According to Telecom Egypt, hosting the new IMRS installation in Cairo will benefit Egypt by increasing Internet user experience and lowering the danger 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 critical capacity to support growth in Internet use across the African continent," it stated. “This, in turn, is projected to drive economic growth and generate 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 cyberattack will be significantly reduced."

Mohamed Nasr, managing director and CEO of Telecom Egypt, stated, "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 by reducing latency and the time it takes for a page to load, particularly during high Internet traffic hours. This would provide immediate benefits to Internet users not only in Egypt, but throughout the African continent. The new IMRS installation will help mitigate the impact of a future cyberattack on the continent, as well as distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) cyberattacks.

Sally Costerton, interim president and CEO of ICANN, remarked, "The IMRS deployment in Cairo represents a significant advancement in upgrading Africa's technical infrastructure. Egypt's strategic role as a digital influencer in the area is critical.

"With this second IMRS installation in Africa, our commitment to the Coalition for Digital Africa project in Africa's digital transformation remains unwavering. This achievement enhances Internet infrastructure not only in Egypt, but throughout the region.

“Prior to the deployment of IMRS in Africa, the majority of African Root Zone DNS queries were handled by IMRS instances located outside the continent. Following the introduction of two IMRS installations, the distribution has shifted, with the majority of requests being serviced within Africa."