Starting this autumn making a cellular call in Israel will cost just 2.5 cents a minute during the first year of operation, the Wall Street Journal reported: the service is from CellCom Israel Ltd – a consortium that includes BellSouth Corp, Safra Group of Brazil and Discount Investment Corp: it recently won permission from the Ministry of Communications of Israel to operate a second cellular network in Israel and beat Southwestern Bell Corp, McCaw Cellular Communications Inc, Sprint Corp and others; CellCom says it will charge no monthly subscription fee for the first two years, and only a $5 a month for the third, fourth and fifth years of operation; there also will be no one-time connection fees for programming customers’ phones; during the second year it will cost 4.5 cents and 9.3 cents the third to fifth years; CellCom plans to invest about $300m in the next three years to build a digital network throughout Israel; it expects to turn profitable around the fourth year of operation and expects to have 400,000 subscribers by then.
