The law, the ISPs and local pricing in Egypt, in detail
Legal status. No Egyptian law bans VPNs by name. Law 175 of 2018 on cybercrime criminalises accessing a blocked website and circumventing measures put in place to restrict access, with penalties including imprisonment, and it is drawn widely enough that using a VPN to reach a blocked news site falls inside it on a plain reading. Enforcement has targeted journalists, activists and people posting content, not the tool. The realistic risk is not being caught using a VPN; it is that a VPN was used to reach something the state already cared about. Source: Law 175 of 2018 on Anti-Cyber and Information Technology Crimes.
What ISPs do. Telecom Egypt, Vodafone Egypt, Orange and Etisalat Misr operate under the same filtering. Egypt has run deep packet inspection at the national level since 2017, when researchers documented middleboxes injecting content into unencrypted connections. That equipment recognises OpenVPN and, more recently, WireGuard handshakes, and drops or resets them on some networks and at some hours. Plain protocols work in the morning and fail in the evening on the same connection, which is the signature of a system tuned by load rather than by policy. Obfuscated transports are not an optimisation here, they are the thing that works.
Commonly blocked: over 500 websites blocked since 2017, the large majority news and human-rights sites, Mada Masr and most independent Egyptian journalism, HuffPost Arabic, Al Jazeera, Medium, Reporters Without Borders, VoIP calling on WhatsApp, Signal and FaceTime, throttled or blocked by several operators, adult sites, several VPN providers' own websites and, at times, their protocols, Telegram, restricted intermittently.
Paying locally. Egyptian cards are limited for foreign currency transactions and the pound's devaluations have made dollar-priced subscriptions expensive in real terms. Providers accepting cryptocurrency are the practical answer, and long terms bought in one transaction protect you from a renewal failing.
4 
Flat €5 a month, no email required, accepts cash; the privacy benchmark.
65
- Owner
- Amagicom AB
- Jurisdiction
- Sweden · Fourteen Eyes
- No-logs audit
- None — apps audited by Cure53, 2024
- Price
- from $5.40/mo
The strongest privacy position of any pick here: no account name, no email, cash accepted by post, and Sweden's courts have already tested what the company holds. For someone whose exposure is legal rather than technical, that matters more than the server count.
No streaming support to speak of, and its bridge modes need more setup than a beginner wants.
- Account is a random number, no email or name
- Same price forever, no intro-vs-renewal games
- Accepts cash by post and Monero
- Streaming unblocking is unreliable by design
- Port forwarding removed in 2023
- Smaller server network
The filter is in the pipe, not in a list
Most censorship is a list. A regulator names a domain, the operators drop it, and any encrypted tunnel restores it because the operator can no longer see which domain you asked for. Egypt does that too, to over five hundred sites, and if that were all it did this page would be short.
What makes Egypt different is that since 2017 researchers have documented national-scale middleboxes on Egyptian networks, initially caught injecting advertising and cryptocurrency mining scripts into unencrypted connections. Equipment that can rewrite traffic in flight can also classify it, and classification is what a VPN has to survive. On Egyptian networks today, plain OpenVPN and WireGuard connections are recognised and reset on some operators, at some hours, on some days. The behaviour is inconsistent, which is worse than a clean block: people conclude their VPN is fine because it worked this morning.
Everything on this page follows from that. Obfuscation is not a feature to prefer here. It is the requirement, and a provider without it does not belong on an Egyptian shortlist regardless of how it scores elsewhere.
Why most Egyptians install a VPN
Not for politics. The everyday reason is calling. Voice and video over WhatsApp, Signal and FaceTime have been blocked or throttled by Egyptian operators for years, a restriction that protects the operators’ international call revenue rather than any stated public interest. Egypt has a very large diaspora, and a family that wants to hear a voice from Kuwait or Milan uses a VPN to do it. That is the mass-market use case, and it is entirely mundane.
The second reason is reading. The May 2017 blocking wave took out Mada Masr, Al Jazeera, HuffPost Arabic, Medium and hundreds of others, and the list has grown rather than shrunk. Independent Egyptian journalism is now read predominantly through tunnels. The people doing that reading are not activists; they are ordinary people who want the news.
The law is the risk, not the network
Law 175 of 2018 is drafted broadly. It criminalises accessing a blocked website and circumventing restrictions on access, with imprisonment among the penalties. Read plainly, opening Mada Masr over a VPN is inside it.
It has not been used that way against ordinary readers. The prosecutions that have happened concerned what people published, and the VPN was incidental. But a broadly drafted law that goes unenforced against the general public is still available, and the honest way to describe Egypt is that the state has both the technical means and the legal instrument, and currently applies neither at scale to ordinary users.
The practical consequence is which properties of a provider matter. In a country where the exposure is legal, a provider that holds no account identity at all is worth more than one with a faster server in Frankfurt. That is why Mullvad, which is a poor choice for streaming and a slightly awkward one for beginners, is on this list.
What we have not measured
We have not run probes from inside Egypt. The protocol behaviour described here comes from user reports across the four main operators and from published research on Egyptian middleboxes. We are not showing a per-provider works-or-not table, because we would be inventing the certainty. When we have a vantage point inside the country, this page gets that table with the date attached.
Practical setup
Enable the obfuscated transport in the app settings before you travel, not after you arrive. On NordVPN in particular the obfuscated servers are a separate list you have to choose; the default connection is the one that gets reset.
Prefer European exits over American ones. Cairo to Frankfurt or Amsterdam is a short hop by submarine cable; Cairo to Virginia is not, and the difference on a video call is obvious.
Pay in a way that survives a devaluation. Egyptian cards are limited for foreign currency and the pound has moved sharply. Cryptocurrency, or a long term bought in a single transaction, is how people here keep a subscription alive.
Understand what the VPN does not cover. It protects the pipe. It does not protect an account you post from, a phone somebody else can pick up, or a conversation with a person who repeats it.
