Bezeq began the high-speed Internet revolution at the end of last week. No, it is not actually providing high-speed Internet. A media campaign, however, can always be mounted. You can say anything in an advertising campaign. Sometimes, though, there is little connection between the advertising and reality.
We'll begin with the campaign's official announcement, published March 15, in which Bezek marketing manager Hertzel Ozer was quoted as saying, "Bezeq has completed its preparations for operating the service, and a marketing trial is currently being successfully completed. Hooking up customers to the ADSL service will begin soon".
Bezeq did not settle for declarations, but moved on to deeds, allowing customers to register for the new "WOW" service on its Internet site. This is a service in which an ADSL modem is installed in the customer's home. The customer will receive broadband high-speed Internet at rates ranging from 256 Kbps to 8 Mbps on ordinary telephone infrastructure.
Nowhere, however, does Bezeq inform the public that it still has no service, that its service file has not been approved by the Ministry of Communications. Bezeq does not reveal that no one has approved its gradual provision of the service at the rate of its installation in call centers, which will take at least four months. Finally (the main point), Bezeq omits mentioning that even if the service file is approved, there is no assurance that the Minister of Communications will give it the green light to commence operations before the cable companies and other competitors are given the go-ahead. Once upon a time September 2000 was spoken of as a target date. Today this date looks unrealistic.
When Jonathon Sappir, manager of the teleprocessing department of Bezeq's marketing division was asked in an interview by "Globes", his answer was, "It is true that there is no regulatory approval, but we intend to store the names of those registering orders in a database". In answer to another question, he said, "Our main target audience, heavy Internet surfers, is aware of regulatory limitations and the negotiations taking place with the Ministry of Communications. They understand that they have to wait".
Do they? This assumption is, to say the least, very impetuous, and is apparently meant to serve Bezeq's marketing interests. Internet surfers do not live in a world of regulation, but of sites.
An additional credibility problem in Bezeq's campaign is the claim that the ADSL service will provide a rate 250 times faster than the currently prevailing one. Is this really so? The maximum rate currently achievable in Internet surfing through dialing is 128 Kbps from an ISDN line, when both lines are exploited simultaneously. Multiplying this speed by 250 gives 32 Mbps - four times ADSL's maximum speed of 8 Mbps.
Even if you take a normal (non-ISDN) dialing line and the maximum speed of a normal modem, which is 56 Kbps, multiplying this by 250 gives 14 Mbps. That is still much faster than Bezeq can provide. Where does our communications monopoly get the insolence to baldly lie to the public, assuming that we're all stupid and won't bother to take a calculator and work it out? "Two hundred and fifty times" looks very good in a marketing campaign. It's round and impressive. Who cares about the truth?
Even if 8 Mbps were 250 times the current speed, who could afford it? Bezeq is talking about a cost of NIS 99 per month, without saying that this will ensure only a speed of 384 Kbps, which is three times the current maximum speed through dialing. This may be a very high speed for the home user, and the Internet will run (if the Internet providers let it run), but it's a far cry from 250 times as fast.
Anyone wanting to get the maximum speed of 8 Mbps, which is 62.5 times the current maximum dialing speed, will pay a much higher monthly fee.
The bottom line is that Bezeq is currently selling an unrealistic utopia to the Internet surfing public, with an inaccurate central speed, thereby being deliberately misleading.
There is still another problem with Bezeq's marketing campaign, as well as with Matav's high-speed Internet campaign and Tevel's "world of tomorrow" campaign, which began at the same time as Bezeq's. All these campaigns ignore the existing condition of Internet infrastructure in Israel, particularly the infrastructure connecting Internet providers with the backbone of the worldwide web in the US.
In order to highlight this problem, it should be noted that the three Internet providers with the largest capacity in overseas lines are NetVision (101 Mbps), Barak (100 Mbps), and Internet Gold (80 Mbps). The figures are from February 2000, and were given by the companies to the latest issue of "Internet World" magazine, which was published last week.
Assuming that only 400 of NetVision's customers, who purchased the minimal guaranteed capacity of 384 Kbps from Bezeq, want to surf simultaneously. This is not an unrealistic assumption, since the number of NetVision's customers has currently reached almost 150,000. They alone will at that moment need 1.5 times NetVision's total capacity for all its customers. The same can be said for the high-speed Internet promises of the cable companies.
It's time for the Ministry of Communications, Bezeq, the cable companies, and the Internet companies to stop filling our heads will nonsense about "high-speed Internet", that has no basis in reality.
Published by Israel's Business Arena on March 16, 2000