Consider this a public service announcement. Minister of Communications Moshe Kachlon has done a lot of good work in the communications field. He is a minister who has generally remained silent about issues not involving his ministry, and he has actually concentrated on working in the area for which he is responsible - opening up the communications market, lowering prices, making the cellphone and internet companies more customer-friendly and he has quietly done a very good job at it.

Minister Kachlon has announced his latest conquest. There are different kinds of phone lines available - for talking, for internet only, "light" lines, forwarding lines and whatnot. It can actually be pretty confusing to try to wade through the various options of types of phone lines.

Nowadays many people see no reason to get a regular, old-fashioned phone line (commonly known today as a "land line"). People are very connected to their cellular phones and there really is not much of a reason to have an additional phone line that costs money to maintain. However, the problem is that for ADSL you need that phone line. Suddenly, just so you can have Internet access, you have to pay for telephone line fees that you are not really interested in. To solve this problem, Bezeq has devised a couple different types of phone lines that are very cheap - like the "Kav Kal" (light line) and the "ADSL only" line.

These types of lines are very cheap, but they still cost money. Not only that, but you really pay twice for the same thing. If you have this "ADSL only" line, on which you cannot make phone calls but can only connect via the ADSL to the internet, you pay Bezeq for the ADSL connection (not including the Internet provider) and you pay for the "ADSL only" line - you are paying twice for the ADSL infrastructure.

Kachlon yesterday made the decision and authorized that such customers will no longer have to pay two fees for what is essentially the same service. Kachlon cancelled the extra fee for just having the line, and consumers will now only pay the one fee for the ADSL service (depending on the speed selected). The decision goes into effect in April. (source: Globes)

I wonder if Bezeq will now raise the other rates, as a way of integrating the soon-to-be-cancelled fee into the remaining fee, rather than just lose that collection completely.

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