Having just spent the past week in Israel, I have some interesting personal observations about the state of the small county’s information and communications technologies industries in general, with a specific focus on its wireless markets.
Israel is a hotbed of technology innovation. Information technology and bio-medical start-ups abound. [If you have not yet read “Startup Nation“, you should download it now.]
Israel has licensed 5 wireless service carriers. Three of them (Orange, Pelephone and Cellcom) have about 90% of the market; Hot Telecom and Golan Telecom are relative newcomers, although Hot Telecom (affiliated with the cable company) acquired the iDen network from a Motorola/Bezeq joint venture.
My son has been in Israel since September to do post doctoral research. He uses Golan Telecom. For 100 NIS per month (about $35), he gets 3GB of data, unlimited voice and national text, including calling to landline phones in a range of countries around the world. Golan leverages seamless roaming on competitor networks to provide customers with the appearance of broader reach. However, my son says that about half of his call attempts overseas fail to connect. Even in suburban Tel Aviv, Golan Telecom subscribers were roaming on the Cellcom network.
My daughter has lived in Israel for 3 years now. She used Cellcom and Orange and she is currently using an MVNO called YouPhone. It is affiliated with one of the grocery chains for affinity savings, somewhat similar to President’s Choice Mobile in Canada. Ever eloquent, she describes her experience surfing the internet on Israel’s cellular networks with colourful language. She says that she would have used more synonyms for “just awful”, but thesaurus.com loaded too slowly. Still, her YouPhone subscription is just 80 NIS per month ($25) for unlimited national talk and text and 1GB of data. For an additional 10 NIS ($3), she added 2 additional GB of data.
Customer service for Golan and YouPhone is done online. YouPhone uses Facebook for its customer support.
Comparisons with Canada are not easy. Electronic devices are expensive; an iPhone 5s (32GB) sells for 4,199 NIS or about $1250. There is no LTE yet in Israel. There are certainly low priced services available in Israel, but no access to the kinds of speeds that most Canadians have been able to get with LTE for more than a year.
Some people seem to be asking why none of Canada’s new entrants try innovative pricing models such as those from Golan Telecom. Did the government and new entrants fail to anticipate the growth of mobile data at the time of the AWS auction, as suggested in the University of Calgary study released in September?
While unlimited international calling wasn’t bundled into any of the Canadian offerings, the new entrants have been providing unlimited voice, text and data plans and in some cases, offered aggressive roaming options. Variants on international calling plans have been made available by some of the new entrants to target various segments of Canada’s multicultural communities. What works to attract customers in Israel will not necessarily be right for Canada, just as we have seen that what works in some regions of Canada doesn’t necessarily play well in other regions.
Would policy makers prefer to see lower prices, even if that results in lower quality networks and customer support? Canada has many more licensed carriers than Israel; how many operators are sustainable, with resources to invest in the market?
Working with Canada’s trade commissioner in Tel Aviv, I spent an afternoon last week speaking with a number of Israeli business leaders about opportunities that could come from cooperative projects with Canada’s telecom sector. There is so much we can learn from such exchanges.
Hopefully, some of them will be attending The Canadian Telecom Summit in June. I hope you will plan to be there too.