Minister of Communications Yoaz Hendel inaugurated Israel's first fiber-optic town today - Shoham. Hendel came to Shoham to take part in a ceremony held by the local council to mark the completion of full deployment of fiber-optic cable in the town by Bezeq, Trend reports with reference to Globes.
Shoham has 6,000 households, and in the past three months all of them, including garden homes, were connected to Bezeq's fiber-optic network though expedited work by the company.
At the end of a tour in which he saw a demonstration of how Bezeq carried out the deployment, Hendel declared that Israel would be the leading county in the world for deployment of fiber-optic networks within 2-3 years. He said that by the end of this year, over 50% of households in Israel would have access to a fiber-optic network. The current proportion is 42%.
"The State of Israel needs infrastructures in order to grow and strengthen. Our population is growing, as are its needs. We must provide a response to this," Hendel said. "I see the Internet as a growth engine that could add NIS 13 billion to Israel's GDP, and I call on Bezeq to continue to speed up deployment as much as it can throughout the country."
Bezeq chairman Gil Sharon said that the company would be prepared to speed up deployment, but that this depended on other factors. He did not specify which factors he meant, but gave a hint when he mentioned the support that telecommunications carriers in the US receive from the government amounting to $20-40 billion for deploying fiber-optic cable in outlying areas.