“Competitors in the communications industry have been trying in the last few days until the last minute to act in the Ministry of Communications to prevent us from entering the fiber-optic market,” Bezeq CEO Dudu Mizrahi said yesterday. The company officially announced its entry into the fiber-optic market yesterday.
Despite the criticism, the CEO clarified that Bezeq maintains a good relationship with most of the communications companies, but refused to confirm or deny that Partner was the company that acted to delay Bezeq’s entry into the market.
According to Bezeq, it intends to connect one million families to the fiber infrastructure by the end of 2021, which means that about 40% of the company’s customers will be connected to the infrastructure. “The deployment will be aggressive and very fast and unprecedented at the world level,” Gil Sharon, chairman of the company’s board of directors, emphasized yesterday.
Currently, an infrastructure of 750,000 fiber optics is deployed across the country, and in practice the homes of 235,000 customers are connected. This is a coverage rate of 28% of the volume of potential customers.
Bezeq says that the company has already invested hundreds of millions of shekels in infrastructure, and intends to increase the volume of its investments by the end of the year and connect 4% – 5% of households every month – at a rate of 100 – 120 thousand customers per month, including detached houses.
The company’s data also shows that about 600,000 customers are already surfing the Internet using the B router, which the company also intends to upgrade. The average browsing speed in the company is 70 megabytes, with a customer who wants 200 megabytes paying NIS 99 per month, 600 megabytes costing NIS 109 per month, and a connection to a speed of 1 GB – NIS 119 per month.
Bezeq will charge a connection fee for the new service at a cost of NIS 12.5 per month for a period of 36 months. Meanwhile, the Partner Group revealed yesterday, at no time, that 150,000 households in Israel are connected to the Partner Faber infrastructure and 336,000 households are connected to the Internet infrastructure through it.
Partner’s independent fiber infrastructure reaches more than 760,000 households (Home Pass) with the option of connecting to the network. Partner distributes optical fibers throughout the country, in dozens of cities from Nahariya to Eilat.
Partner CEO Itzik Benvenisti added: “Nearly half of Partner’s Internet customers are Partner Faber customers. “Partner is an example of the possibility of significant deployments in peak times, and of the ability to produce real change in the quality of life and communications infrastructure in Israel.”