OT: Cell phone service providers

[Mord Behar]

After two months on Golan, my results are as follows:
About 1 in 3 calls has a "problem". A problem is either garbled audio, a
lack of connection or a disconnect. There seems to be no correlation
between problems and the carrier at the other end. Obviously garbled audio
is more common than disconnects. The ratio is approximately 1:7.
Text messages are unreliable. I receive them 3-4 minutes before they are
sent (the timestamp from the server) and they often (unfortunately I have
no numbers for this) take several hours to arrive.
The cellular internet is noticeably slower than our previous provider
(Pelephone) and coverage is worse.
The network time does not work. At all. Not even a little bit. Neither my
Nokia candybar nor my wife's Samsung II s2 updated the DST.
In summary: you get what you pay for. The 10 NIS a month plan is great for
me, since my phone doesn't really do internet. For that price I'm willing
to accept service problems. The 60 NIS plan for my wife is borderline okay.
If the service gets a little bit worse we'll need to reevaluate.
I hope this helps someone in the future.
Thank you everybody for your input.
We went with Golan. One phone the 59 NIS a month unlimited plan, the other
the 10 NIS a month plan.
On the 10 NIS phone I'm trying to keep track of dropped and garbled calls,
as well as good calls. Not exactly scientific, since I forget a few and I
don't always know the carrier on the other end. But maybe it will help
somebody in the future.


On Tue, Feb 11, 2014 at 8:15 PM, Beni Cherniavsky-Paskin <
beni.cherniavsky at gmail.com> wrote:

> + Golan also have the nice property that they throttle you if you exceed
> 3G instead of charging huge overage fees.
> I guess throttling = 2G speed, which is barely usable, but I'm more
> concerned with paying a predictable bill — an option to hard-limit data
> usage would also be acceptable.
>
> e.g. Rami Levi told me they don't have a have a hard-limit option, I have
> to monitor my usage (and they'll send me SMSes when I approach the limit).
>  It's easy enough to set up a limit in android, just made me a little
> annoyed as an approach.
> - What annoyed me more with Rami Levi was when I upgraded the data plan in
> the middle of the month (1G->5G IIRC) and they charged me some overage at
> that moment because my usage since the start of the month exceeded 1G *
> <portion of the month>.
>
> Pre-paid plans guarantee a predictable bill, of course.  But these cost
> more at all providers.
>
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