Telecom companies which employed tens of thousands mostly young educated because of the massive growth since early 2000s, have been facing now slowdown if not shrinking because most people here are now communicating for free using whatsapp and viber. These companies were doing also nasty things like injecting advertisement codes inside plain html pages to earn money, as most people here are browsing only facebook and twitter which use https, it became harder for them to compensate their losses on their main service (phone calls). They were colluding with the government to ban some chat apps on 3g communication and postpone new technologies like 4g and faster adsl connections in order to make people obliged to return to phone calls. The government knows very well that these companies are too big to fail as they are maybe the biggest employer in the country.
I work for a telcom company in Southern Africa. We make billions every year and a lot of that comes from data. Almost nobody makes phone calls these days. When LTE rolled out, the data usage basically doubled. When people have a fast connection they'll use it to watch endless youtube videos and other data hungry apps/services, and they will pay for it.
So if Egypt's telcom companies want to make money, they need to upgrade their infrastructure. A huge initial cost, to be sure. But it will definitely pay for itself, and they will be raking in money before they know it.
> it became harder for them to compensate their losses on their main service (phone calls)
If nobody's interested in voice service and you can't recoup your capital costs, why not just quit while you're ahead and stop providing voice service—thus at least freeing you from needing to pay maintenance on the voice infrastructure?
that's what we call national security/stability here in the middle east :D. Seriously though, the government and the three telecom companies Orange/Vodafone/Etisalat falsely think that this is a win win situation to save the telecom industry and national security, however when it reall comes to terrorism, you can organize a terror attack using facebook chat without anyone knowing anything about you, maybe even after the attack if you are paranoid enough and take all social engineering precautions.
FWIW this happens in other Arab countries too. In Dubai the same carrier Etisalat got a ban on the audio functionality of mobile apps - no calls on Whatsapp, Viber etc. You can still text though.
