Telecoms providers face higher fines over service failures: The National Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (NTRA) has ordered the four telecom providers — Telecom Egypt, Orange Egypt, Etisalat Egypt, and Vodafone Egypt — pay a combined EGP 35.7 mn in fines for failing to meet standards, according to the regulator’s biannual complaints report. That’s nearly triple the fines they were told to pay in H2 2021.

They’ll also have to refund 4x more to customers: The providers were ordered to reimburse users a combined EGP 3.3 mn for service failures during 2H 2022, a more than fourfold increase from EGP 780k during the same period in 2021.

IN CONTEXT- Those payouts are absolute peanuts — mere rounding errors in view of the size of each operator’s P&L here.

Complaints rose more than 50%: Users submitted 184.2k complaints during the second half of last year, up from 121.8k in the same period in 2021.

What were people complaining about? Mobile services took the lead, making up 35% of the complaints made to the NTRA over the six-month period. Fixed internet came in second at 34% and landlines at 30%.

The most complained about provider? Orange, which received some 1.9k complaints per 100k subscribers for its internet services and 77 complaints per 100k for mobile.

WiFi down? You’re entitled to compensation: The regulator has introduced a new mechanism to compensate fixed internet users “no less than the actual cost of service” when their service is interrupted.

For visual thinkers: The NTRA released an infographic (pdf) highlighting all the key figures.