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Tip to get Internet in Egypt

So with the hotels charging obscene amounts for Internet iin Egypt, I did a little preparation before flying here. I saw that the mobile network operators were doing prepaid sims at good prices. So I unpacked the usb modem, I was gifted by Vodafone in the UK last year for taking up a sim-only 12 month contract, and got it unlocked for GBP 1.49. I packed the usb modem and my Fonera 2.0n router which can also take usb 3g/gsm modems and provide a wifi access point. The day after arriving in Cairo, I went to a Vodafone shop and asked for a prepaid data sim. They offered me one with or without a usb modem. The one without costs 15LE (less than 2GBP) and comes with 166MB included without topup required. So I plug in the usb modem with this Vodafone Egypt sim into the Fonera and within 5 seconds I have a wpa protected wifi ssid advertised that I can use on my laptop, N900, Alia’s N900 and ipod touch.

So total cost of about 3.49GBP and I have wifi with probably enough Megabytes for the length of our trip. Beats paying 20 GBP a day for hotel wifi and can use it with all devices and it is fast thanks to HSDPA coverage.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 2nd, 2010 at 6:27 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Responses to “Tip to get Internet in Egypt”

  1. mobile neophyte Says:
    May 3rd, 2010 at 4:45 pm

    As a mobile broadband neophyte, I’d be really grateful for more details on how to achieve this feat:

    * How do you unlock the modem for £1.49 ?
    * Can this be done entirely in Linux ?

    Thanks for any advice ….

  2. Adam Williamson Says:
    May 3rd, 2010 at 5:00 pm

    166MB really isn’t a lot. I burned through 100MB in an afternoon’s tethered work on Friday. You can stay within a bandwidth limit if you’re really careful, but it’s not easy. It doesn’t help that there’s no way to tell NetworkManager that an ‘ethernet’ or ‘wifi’ connection is ultimately being provided by a cell data connection and hence cause it to trigger low-bandwidth modes in some apps, as far as I know.

  3. Abdel in Cairo Says:
    May 4th, 2010 at 3:12 pm

    This hotel is a fucking ripoff. Even 3-star hotels in Cairo now offer free wifi.

  4. free wifi Says:
    April 1st, 2012 at 8:33 pm

    Yes I commuted for a semester and it was WAY easier to eat healthy, for sure.

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    May 20th, 2013 at 4:20 pm

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