I have just had a length fight with 012 over traffic shaping, they admitted using brand new inhouse software to control network traffic, tehy have 2 levels, normal and gamer which gets a little more streaming traffic. At work they also admitted using it until the bezeq engineer complained. 012 is a terrible service and is restricted the heaviest in Israel - avoid it.

I've always found the internet to be incredibly slow, I think they are being cheap about their bandwidth.

There have been reports that the EU has taken action to block Bittorrent and other P2P services. The prosecution of recently of the owners of Pirate Bay is another example of EU action against file sharing. If my memory serves me correctly, the Israeli Hight Court of Justice ruled that it was illegal to interfere with the Internet. This ruling was handed down a few years ago. Maybe someone has more information on this. Something that should be taken up with those who squeal "Piracy" is how the software manufacturers, movie and music production companies and even hardware manufacturers rip off the consumer. You buy a DVD and it costs you NIS100. You buy a music CD and there are one or two good songs on it and these rest id rubbish! New operating systems and software force consumers to buy new equipment and even new computers. What should be investigated is the abuse of consumers and the actual cost of making a music or movie disc versus the profits of the manufacturer! Bear in mind that the artists' royalties are a pittance compared to the profits of the producers!

Note that Netvision and Bezeq are saying that they offer the "best SURFING EXPERIENCE" while the study refers to download "experience". This is classical double-talk which tries to hide the fact that in reality they are performing traffic shaping in blatant contradiction to their promise to the customer. Surfing requires very little bandwidth, while downloading/uploading needs the full extent of the service the customer pays for. They should know that not all downloads are illegal and that their more serious customers will not hesitate to sue if traffic shaping has a negative influence on their operational costs - and it usually has since this can be translated into time lost and hence, into money. I can attest that at least Netvision to which I am connected, throttles down downloads (not only P2P!) by an average of 50% of what you've paid for, sometimes going down to as much as 80%! I had a few chats with Netvision's and they tried to "sweet talk" me by claiming "network load" outside of Israel, but they did not estimate that I actually have the tools to measure that load. I pointed out that if they don't "fix the problem", I will sue them and also move to another ISP then, after about 30 minutes, the "problem was fixed", but since then, it has "returned" and now I am evaluating the various option to sue them - including punitive damange. IMO, the best way is to sue the ISPs in a class action that will have the highest impact on their finances and will encourage the regulator to turn a specific and on-going attention to their shady business practice. Who will be the Law Firm which will take this challenge and make a lot of noise (and self-advertising) by concucting such an action?

I wouldn't be surprised to discover that the ISPs have synchronized their trafic-shaping practices to prevent users from moving to the competitor due to artificially slowed-down performance. If this is the case, this is another thing which the "Reshut Le Hegbelim Yiskiim" has to intervene and charge them with illegale "cartelization" of the Quality of Service. Either way, us, the end users, must not let this noise fade down and should keep "harassing" the ISPs with complaints and legal action until they provide the service we are all paying for with our hard-earned money!

It must be noted that Israelis use Skype a lot and it is also based on a P2P architecture. So throttling will hurt VoIP in general and Skype in particular.

I definitely have a lot of problems with Skype that seem to be caused by my Israeli ISP (012). Back in Europe and under the same software enviroment, there were hardly any connection issues. Over here, I am experiencing blocked calls, connection drops, etc. all the time. Sometimes I have to call someone a dozen times until the connection gets established.

I myself caught my ISP doing it and sure enough they told me they have no idea what I'm talking about. Though this article is good news. According to the response from Communications Ministry, and to the way people see it, we're not going to have the same humiliating, ridiculous debate as to whether ISP should even be allowed to do it. This is good news.

about 180 kb/sec. i sometimes reach 210.

.. then "sometimes" 210 but MOST OF THE TIME you get 100 or less. You should watch your speed more carefully. Interesting though which ISP you use...

012 Smile , is blocking many many traffics, especially of games. and it's workers didn't know any solution to help.it's bad service for everyone who uses Torrent or p2p programs ,, or who playing games, by the way it has good speed at HTTP downloads,, but i think thig like this seems to be normally ,, because all the services should give us this present :)

There is in Israel a law against the public performance of Wagner's music. It seems that ISP 012 are preventing the private downloading and listening to Wagner. I have on utorrent for three weeks a torrent from Demonoid. According to Demonoid there are several seeds and peers. But on utorrent none are shown. This is a clear illegal censorship by ISP 012.

hello to everyone? i live in beer-sheva and i have problems with the incoming connections! all the incoming ports are closed by HOT. in present i study in bengurion university and i want to make some experiments on some virtual servers in my house(web, ftp, ssh, imap, also gaming server), i want to give access to someone to my servers in order to test the security and the viability of the server but without success. i have tried to redirect my ip through many dns providers like no-ip or dyndns, the router have no firewall but the modem(cable tv modem: terayon tj715x) it is inaccessible. the default password is not working in order to get inside to see the configuration. someone have any idea what to do? to speak with HOT or just change the provider? if we speak about changing the provider, what do you recommend? thank you all, ynet for the article and everyone else!