Only one in 10 of the 50,000 or so Israelis now hooked into the Internet is a hard-core user, who ventures out onto the global Information Superhighway on a daily basis. Most of the rest venture onto the Net only rarely, by virtue of their ties with universities, public institutions or high-tech international companies with R&D facilities in Israel.
The local access road onto the Infobahn dates back a decade, when Israeli educational institutions wired into Bitnet, a global academic computing network. That connection has evolved and widened into the Israel Academic Network (ILAN), which is now responsible for maintaining Internet connectivity in Israel.
There are two links between Internet in Israel and the rest of the world: One, via satellite, starts at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot and ends up in New York City, at NYSERNet; the other runs by undersea cable from Tel Aviv University to Geneva. Multinationals with branches in Israel, like IBM and Intel, have their own satellite Internet connections.
Israelis without a way to join Internet through their university or workplace can subscribe to one of four commercial companies offering dial-in accounts to private customers: Kav Mancheh, Dataserv, Bezeq Zahav and Actcom, each of which charges about $ 60 a month. All individual link-ups are through ILAN, and require a license from the Ministry of Communications.
Zvi Lando of Jerusalem One, an Israel-based service that provides a full range of Internet activity with a Jewish twist, sees great potential locally. "On J1," he says, "Jews can do Jewish activity' in an atmosphere completely under their control not guided by rabbis, politicians or other well-meaning people… No one coerces them to do anything."
Lando predicts that his service, which now has 120,000 users (there is no subscription fee), will more than double by the end of the year. Very soon, he believes, Jerusalem will be "the information capital of the Jewish world." o S.T.