«Dry run» launches of products and services that are inaccessible to the consumer have become de rigueur in the communications sector. Cellcom announced «Third Generation Services» that would enable video communications between subscribers, but didn’t really tell us that the infrastructure covered only a small area of the country, the devices were expensive and hard to come by, and the last thing the cellular service provider really wanted was mass demand for this nonexistent service.
Internet service provider Netvision entered the international long distance calls market with a ploy that offered service only to subscribers with a huge number of calls to North America. That may not have actually constituted long distance service, but it made the company look like it was competing in the international calls market a few weeks earlier than it actually had service for all.
But the cable television sector’s launch of telephone service was the greatest feint of all. In light of
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Using a sophisticated price list, they explained that the new service is just a small perk they plan at the moment to offer a chosen few subscribers (perhaps those who threatened to desert in favor of satellite TV? No one said so explicitly, but the cable companies also don’t deny it). A policy of «customer retention» in multichannel television does not constitute competition with Bezeq.
The cable companies didn’t choose the timing of the declared launch for business purposes or for public relations, as other companies have done. They tried to meet conditions they accepted when they got permission to merge into a single cable television company. The conditions mandated they had to launch a commercial telephone network. And what do you do when you miss a deadline? Announce a service that doesn’t actually exist.
We can hope it’s just a minor technical problem, and the CEO of the cable companies’ joint operations Ram Belinkov will live up to his promises to provide the service to all in a matter of months. But the unnecessary and misleading launch could have been avoided simply: those who determined that the cable telephone network had to go live in a year, could have given them a reasonable extension to make the launch of cable telephone service a real celebration for communications consumers.