 Hi this is Daniel Roto, welcome back to my YouTube channel, this YouTube channel covers everything related to living in Israel. One of the state of Israel's modern claims to fame is that it's the start-up nation, and that it is the highest density of start-ups in any country in the world. Undoubtedly lots of amazing technology has been developed in Israel. However, much of it is developed and exported to international markets before being finally adopted in Israel after somebody decides that it's worthwhile selling here. It's a phenomenon that I like to call the boomerang effect, and explains in part why contactless payments were prevalent in Europe and America for years before they were finally rolled out in Israel relatively recently. There are a few well-known examples of this strange tech paradox, one being the fact that Israel is famously reluctant to give up on its use of the fax machine. As late as 2016 Israel announced that it was beginning to phase out its usage of this decidedly old-school technology. The passage of the law mandating this wasn't so much an indication of Israel bureaucracies technological prowess as an admission that the only way to get government offices to stop demanding that things be sent by fax was to legally compel them to do so. I'd like to suggest that internet connectivity is another example worth pointing to. For all its technological prowess, you'd assume that internet connectivity in Israel was a highly developed network, but in reality many residents, even those in central areas, still have no better connectivity options than DSL and Coaxial. But what about the national fiber role, I hear you say? It's true that Israel is in the process of rolling out high-speed, fiber-optic internet connectivity to its population. However, it's also true that in Israel, just like in other countries, politicians tend to be better at making promises than actually delivering on those actual plans. Last summer, Israel's then-communications minister, Joav Hendel, claimed that 70% of Israeli households would have access to fiber-optic internet by the end of 2022. By June 2022, there were more than 670,000 subscribers to fiber, accounting for more than 1.6 million households. The only problem is that Israel has a population of close to 10 million citizens, and the government's own publicly accessible data contradicts the claim that fiber-optic connectivity is on the way to being very easily accessible throughout the country. Here's a life schematic maintained by Israel's Ministry of Communications, showing the progress that Israel's main telecommunications company, Bezek, is making in providing fiber-optic connectivity throughout the country. The green shading represents areas that are expected to be connected to the network by August 2023. The purple network shows those forecasts for connectivity by November 2024, and the blue areas are those where the telco hasn't assigned a target date to yet. In such instances, the date defaults to year-end 2027, which is when Bezek is supposed to finish its role. Zooming into Jerusalem, Israel's capital city, we can see that there are very much large sways of the city that have no better target date for fiber-optic connectivity than more than four years in the future. And in Tel Aviv, it's very much the same story. These screenshots were taken, by the way, on the date in which the video was uploaded. Studies have shown that high-speed internet is linked to rising levels of prosperity. Given the growing importance of remote connectivity and the poor reliability of over-subscribed coaxial and DSL lines, I believe that achieving near 100% penetration should be a very high national priority for Israel, and that a deadline for that more than four years into the future is simply way too slow. When it comes to fiber-optic connectivity, it's important to look beyond politician's statements and forecasts to understand how well the rollout is actually happening on the ground. How's internet in your part of Israel? Leave me a comment with your thoughts, and subscribe and like to get more videos about life in Israel.