[Asterisk-biz] Israel to block International VoIP calls?

[Yair Hakak]

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 <shmaltz at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12/16/05, Steve Kennedy <steve-asterisk at gbnet.net> 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.
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