If you thought you weren’t getting the internet connection speed you’re paying for, you may be right. According to Knesset member Meir Sheetrit, the two companies in Israel that provide infrastructure and backbone services for internet connection – Bezeq (the phone company) and Hot (the cable company) – are not going to be able to provide the super-fast speeds they are promising to customers, except in maybe a few places.

Sheetrit suggests that the companies be required by law to tell customers the maximum speed they can expect in their areas, considering the potential for misleading customers. “Often, because of their naiveté, customers sign up for service at high speed and prices, only to find out that the company is unable to provide the service,” he wrote in a letter to the Knesset Technology Committee.

Sheetrit forgot to add what comes next – the near-impossibility of getting your money back after you’ve been ripped off by these vultures. It’s bad enough that they (by “they” I mean almost every large service company, not just ISPs) will try to sell you stuff you don’t need at almost every turn, but when the service or product they dump off on you doesn’t even work, trying to get your money back is out of the question – the best you can hope for, usually, is a credit towards a future purchase. In other words, once they’ve got your money, you’re not getting it back!

As I wrote in the Jerusalem Post, it’s a worldwide trend – service and quality you once expected as a matter of course is now “premium,” as companies, strapped for cash, nickel and dime us for everything they can squeeze out of us.

Why am I not surprised? This is just another manifestation of an attitude that you find in so many places, from the corner store to the bank to, of course, the government. They sweet talk you and act like you’re their best friend when they try to get you to sign up – but once they have your money, try getting the time of day out of them!

Here are a few good tests I’ve found which indicates how badly you are going to get ripped off:

• Before ordering a service, call the company’s service line, and see how long they keep you waiting. While all companies are guilty of giving lousy service, some are less bad than others. As I do lots of research for my writing, I call companies like Orange, Bezeq, etc. to ask questions, even if I’m not a subscriber to the service. A good indication of what to expect is the “sales to service call” ratio – ie, the time difference between how fast the sales people answer the phone, and how slowly the service people talk to you. The bigger the gap, the worse the service, I’ve found.

• Ditto for the sales pitches they give you, both recorded and live. Some companies will respond to nearly every question with a sales pitch, basically ignoring what you asked (but implying that your problem can be solved if you just ‘upgrade’). Often long times on hold are coordinated with repeated recorded sales pitches – it’s as if they keep you waiting just so they can get you to listen to their stupid ads! Avoid companies that do this, if possible.

• Any service or sales person that does not implicitly understand that they work for you – and not the opposite – is a bad reflection on the company they work for. When I speak to sales or service reps, I’m very attuned to signs of cynicism or superciliousness. If the person on the other end of the phone sounds like s/he has his/her nose up in the air when they talk to you – like they’re somehow better than you (even though you’re paying their salary!) – it’s time to move on.

How do you resolve these issues? In Israel, a loud voice always helps. You have to be prepared “lahafoch shulchanot” (go crazy), as they say. Threaten to switch, cancel the service, or threatening to tell all your friends how bad the service/product is can help too, sometimes; most of the people you speak to on the phone don’t care one way or the other, but if you really do cancel or switch, you can be sure their manager will be listening to the recording of the conversation and probably call them on it, so if you can make them understand that it is they who are causing you to want to leave the company, they may think twice before acting nasty. Unfortunately, there’s no sure-fire single method that works every time; it’s a matter of experimentation, seeing which company reacts to what tactic.

But it’s worth the effort; when you confront the service providers and make them understand what they are doing wrong, you are contributing to an improvement of the consumer culture in this country – and maybe even helping the next person not to get ripped off!

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In my Jpost article today, I talked about the alternatives to Israeli phone ex-monopoly Bezeq. While only Bezeq can still offer traditional PSTN phone service, a host of challengers have arisen to provide consumers with broadband-based home phone services, usually on a POP (pay one price, like at Great Adventure) basis. Until customers can connect to the internet at more than the current 8mb/s (most people here have 5mb/s or less), I wrote that transferring for your home phone service to the internet – which for various reasons is dicey enough in Israel (the infrastructure sometimes hems and haws) – might not be such a good idea, at least until Bezeq’s NGN fast data transfer infrastructure (reputed to provide up to 50mb/s capabilities) reaches your neighborhood. And the truth is, Bezeq’s prices and service aren’t all that terrible.

Now. Now they’re not so terrible. As one reader commented on the Jpost site, Bezeq’s prices and service aren’t so terrible now because the company has five competitors breathing down its neck, who are actually having an impact on its customer base. For me, with a network of five or six home computers that are always on and active, downloading, processing, or presenting and playing this or that, adding internet-based home phone service would be just another strain on the system (I’ve been down that road anyway, with both Skype – which usually behaves, but sometimes doesn’t – and a dedicated softphone, complete with VoIP box). But for  any folks who aren’t heavy web surfers, saving 50 or 100 shekels a month on their phone bills by switching away from Bezeq. Many are doing so. It makes lots of sense – and can be a very satisfying experience.

That’s because everybody has their “Bezeq story.” You can’t really blame them for the crappy service in the “old days,” before 1984, when the culprit was the government-controlled Ministry of Communications. But you can blame them for the crappy service after 1984, when the Ministry spun-off Bezeq into a separate – but still government-controlled – enterprise.

Even just a few years ago, on the eve of its becoming a private company, Bezeq was still mired in its old ways. Example: You have been able to pay your Bezeq bill by credit card anytime, day or night, over an automated system for nearly a decade. You call their service number (199), press some buttons, and input your credit card number using your keypad. The process is pretty efficient – now. Until about a year and a half or so ago, however, it was much easier to call during business hours and get a real person; that virtual cashier would go on and on for eons, making you repeat input, checking and rechecking things.

Perhaps they planned the system like that for uptight Israelis who expect to be given a hard time by the people they pay for services, but what should have been an easy input-based bill paying exercise turned out to require your full attention for as long as ten minutes! Note that this situation prevailed even during a substantial period when Bezeq was a private company. They’ve cleaned up the input manager now, and it now takes about three minutes to go through the process of changing things.

But that’s not my Bezeq story – instead, this is it: About seven years ago (2002) I was getting ready to leave with my wife and kids for a family trip to U.S. relatives. The flight was to leave quite early, I remember, and we were up long before dawn making last minute preparations. Then it hit me – I forgot to pay the phone bill, which was already overdue by a couple of days! But where was the bill? Already edging on towards late and trying to take care of a plethora of last minute details, I search and searched, but couldn’t find the bill.

When you call Bezeq from your home phone, the computer identifies your phone number and account  – and that feature was active in the 2002 version of the Bezeq online payment system. So no problem, right? You don’t really need a bill; call the automatic payment system, let it identify your account  via your phone number, let it tell you how much you owe, and pay.

That’s the way you would expect it to work – but not at Bezeq circa 2002. While the system could identify who you were, it couldn’t tell you how much you owed! You had to have the bill in front of you in order to input the full – exact, down to the agora – you were supposed to pay. What if you didn’t have the bill, or wanted to pay in advance? Could you, before, say, going out of town and having lost your bill, input a clearly inflated sum like NIS 500 (instead of the NIS 200 the bill usually was), and let them hold it for you on account?

You could try – as I did – and be told that the payment had been recorded in the system. And you would go on your merry way, confident that Mamale Bell was watching out for you. And you wouldn’t even realize you had a problem until you sauntered back home three weeks later and picked up the phone – and heard nothing!

Why nothing? Because Bezeq had cut off your service. And why had they cut off your service? Because you didn’t pay your bill. But Ms. Bezeq lady, you beg, I lost the bill and input much MORE than I owed, so you would get your money! It’s just not fair! To which the Bezeq lady would reply, in more or less words, “tough.” To get your service back, you had to pay your bill PLUS a cutoff fee, EVEN THOUGH your payment was seemingly accepted at the time of payment by the system!

And you, left holding the bag, seethe with rage. And you tell the Bezeq lady, “All right for you. But one day the government is going to allow competition, and on the first day they do, I am dumping you for anyone else that can offer home phone service, even if they charge more money than you!”

So much for dreams of sweet revenge. Nowadays, it would seem that the revolution is over, that Bezeq has joined the family of humanity and positive human relations. But people like us remember – and our day will come yet!