The Israeli Globes published an article today comparing the price of a new, carrier-“subsidized” phone with the price of the same phone bought at a typical cell phone store.  The results are shocking!  By buying the phone through your carrier, you may pay almost 2,000 shekel more for the same device than you would pay if you buy it separately!  (See the comparison tables at the bottom of that article.)

The flip side is that most carriers allow you to pay a (small) fraction of their cost, each month, over the course of 36 months, so that you avoid the initial “shock” of buying a phone out-right.  Still, with a savings of several thousand shekel over the course of three years, it might be worth biting the bullet and paying upfront.  I’m not very well versed in the tashlumim concept of Israeli credit cards, but that is another option to explore when buying a phone privately, if you are both looking to save money and spread out the cost.

In light of user feedback, I’ve added basic contact information for each of the cell providers to their associated pages on this website.  I know that navigating some of these company’s websites can be a challenge in the best of circumstances, so I hope that this change will help the users of this website beyond just their purchasing decision.

Additionally, to help explain things further during that decision phase, I’ve added a link to the more in-depth article that I wrote regarding the varying frequencies used by the providers on each of the providers’ webpages.  I hope that this will help prevent anyone from signing up for a service that they can’t use with their mobile phone!

I am constantly looking for feedback from my visitors to know how I might be able to improve this website.  If you have any suggestions, please feel free to share them in the comments section, or by using the Contact Me page.  Thank you!

Not all cell phones are created equal!  I don’t just mean this with regards to the features that they have, and certainly not in the context of iPhone vs. Android.  Rather, the part of a cell phone which makes it a cell phone (instead of just a really small computer in your pocket) is the cell phone antenna, which communicates with the antennas in the cell phone towers of your provider.  Like other kinds of radios, the antennas in cell phone towers communicate only on certain frequencies, and if your phone can’t “tune” to the frequency that your cell provider uses, your phone won’t receive service.

These days, the story is slightly more complicated, because cell providers often use multiple frequencies, and so do many cell phones!  Ideally, your cell phone would be compatible with every frequency that your cell provider uses.  This way, if you’re out of the range of one signal, you can still fall back to another, and therefore still have service.  If your cell phone is compatible with only one of your provider’s frequencies, then even while you may normally have service, if you find yourself in an area with limited reception, you might find yourself without service.

This article (Hebrew) from ynet outlines which providers use which frequencies, and by extension, which phones are compatible with which providers.  I’ve integrated this information onto all of the carrier pages, because it is extremely important when choosing a cell phone provider if you plan to keep your existing phone.  This is especially true these days, when some carriers only support 3G, which effectively means that many older phones will not work with them.

For convenience, I’ve translated and included the summary table:

*Golan Telecom and HOT Mobile will roam onto partner networks in areas where they don’t yet have their own towers. For Golan Telecom, the roaming will be on Cellcom’s network; for HOT Mobile, Pelephone’s network.

Hello, and welcome to the launch of the Israel Cell Compare website!

I started this website to help the English-speaking community in Israel find basic information about the many cell phone plans available.  This mostly came about as a need – I was (and continue to be) surprised by the lack of cell plan information available in English here, and have even witnessed some of the cellular operators which do post information in English, posting incomplete information.  In response to this apparent gaping hole, I scrubbed the operators’ websites for information about their plans, translated it, and posted it here.  I hope to keep this information relatively up to date, and have made this easy to verify by indicating when a particular page was last checked at the page’s bottom.

I am launching this site with information on the five “full” networks in Israel – the veterans, Cellcom, Orange, and Pelephone; along with the leaders of the Summer 2012 “Cell Phone Revolution”, Golan Telecom and HOT Mobile.  It is my hope to add the smaller, “virtual”, networks, like those available at certain supermarkets and otherwise, as time goes on.  As a likely incomplete list, that would include 012 Mobile, Rami Levy Telecommunications, and YouPhone.

I acknowledge that the information posted on this site is incomplete (in part because of the lack of the carriers listed above, but more importantly because this is an independent website without any inside knowledge of the various cell carriers in Israel), and I encourage every visitor to confirm that the information here is correct, and be sure to use this website as an additional resource when making your decision – not the only resource.  That said, I hope that the information provided here can help save everyone some money, and find the right provider for them.

I ask you to please share this website with your friends, coworkers, classmates, and anyone else who might find it’s useful!  Additionally, if you did find this site helpful, you can donate some of that money you’ll be saving to me via PayPal by clicking here.

I hope that you enjoy this site!