people, there is a lot of misinformation here. 1. bezeq is no longer a monopoly as of november 2004. there is now a second entrant, called "HOT telecom", run by the cable companies. 2. as of this monday there will be a third company, called "012 telecom" which will concentrate on PRI's for business users. 3. we are currently running a VOIP "marketing experiment" where each company can sign up 8500 users. At the end of the marketing experiment we intend to give these companies licenses as regular phone companies. 911 issues have substantially been solved, based on our mediation between the emergency services and the providers. we will have full 911 service for al licensed providers from day 1, without having to go through the ILEC. 4. it's all well and good to say "anyone can open a VOIP company" but in a country without much competition that doesnt work. say i want to open a vonage-type service in the US, i have 2 options. either i register as a CLEC, or i have a relationship with a CLEC, who treats me as a large customer. the second option is not viable in israel, because as a new VOIP entrant you're not going to find a CLEC who will work with you. so, we're left with registering as a CLEC, or, in our terms, getting a license.
remember also that there's no unbundling here (it's not a big country and unbundling is not exactly an unqualified success elsewhere), which makes things kind of different. and Paul, i am fully aware of using an alias so as not to get harvested by spammers, but the poster could have used his name, or some indication of who he was, before making a comparision with fidel castro. as i said before, i'm happy to talk to anyone about these issues, off list, at any time, i'm in kind of an interesting position as a voip enthusiast and a regulator, and i think a dialogue between the regulators and the open-source voip community is a good thing. -yair On 12/16/05, C F <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On 12/16/05, Steve Kennedy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Fri, Dec 16, 2005 at 10:27:22AM -0500, C F wrote: > > > > > The point, I was very surprised to see that Israel has such laws that > > > still gives Bezek the control to stay the monopoly. But they do, it is > > > illegal in Israel to open a VoIP company like what we can do here > > > (which is getting harder here as well because of the 911 requirments). > > > Unless you have a license as a phone company. > > > > Why is that so odd? The UK only deregulated voice a couple of years ago > > as part of an EU directive. Previously any one offering voice services > > had to have a telco license, now anybody can be a telco (but they have > > obligations under the Communications Act, which many are not aware of or > > maybe ignore). > > > > It takes a while for countries to demonopolise state companies (I don't > > think the French gov has divested all of FT yet) ... Israel will get > > there. > > > > Also once you let phone calls out into the wild, you cant tap them and > > governments may have a vested interest to do so. > > > > > > Steve > > > > > Israel has already deregulated them, that's why it's so odd. > _______________________________________________ > --Bandwidth and Colocation provided by Easynews.com -- > > Asterisk-Biz mailing list > To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: > http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-biz > _______________________________________________ --Bandwidth and Colocation provided by Easynews.com -- Asterisk-Biz mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-biz
