International differences in telecommunications demand

Countries with significantly different development levels experience similar regulatory transformations in the telecommunications industry. While these changes may be particularly successful in lowering costs, they may also lead to lower consumer welfare in markets in which consumers are highly sensitive to price changes. This paper assessed whether price elasticities for telecommunications demand differ between broad groups of countries according to their development levels. We provided empirical evidence of differences in estimated demand elasticities between developed and less developed countries. Our results suggest that consumers in poorer countries may experience greater welfare losses when incentive regulations are implemented.Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia

Internet traffic dynamics

The telecommunications industry has evolved at unprecedented rates with current estimates suggesting that seven percent of the world’s population now has access to the Internet. However, such growth has stimulated vigorous competition in national and international telecommunications markets leading to a price-cost margin squeeze and unsustainable rates of network expansion. This study demonstrates the reliability of established extrapolation methods for forecasting bandwidth demand and provides network managers with the opportunity to observe Internet traffic dynamics. The ability to anticipate periods of peak use and surplus capacity is likely to pay dividends in terms of a more targeted approach to network expansion plans.Telecommunications; forecasting; bandwidth

"Input-output Structure and Growth in China"

The fast and steady economic growth in China during the 1990s has attracted much international attention. Using the three most recent Chinese input-output tables, this paper investigates industry structure and inter-industry relationships and the relationship of both to economic growth. The input-output tables contain intermediate demand and final demand for six broad industries, namely, Agriculture, Industry, Construction, Transportation, Post and Telecommunications, Services, and Other, for 1992, 1995 and 1997, which enables computing of input-output coefficients for three time periods. As direct and indirect input-output coefficients characterise industry structure during a particular time period, changes over time reflect the patterns in industry structure evolvement. Furthermore, output growth in a particular industry can be analysed from two different sources, namely the changes in input-output coefficients that reflect technological change, and the change in final demand. This paper sheds light on four different issues over the five-year period from 1992 to 1997: (1) Was growth driven by technological changes or final demand increases? (2) As a result of the interdependence of industries, how did an increase in final demand in one industry affect growth in another? (3) How has the bottleneck of an insufficient capability in the Transportation, Post and Telecommunications sector to cope with demands from other sectors been affected during this period? (4) Has the industry structure of the economy been shifting in conformity with traditional growth theory, namely with a decline in the agricultural sector and a rise in the modern industrial sector?

Jeffrey Rohlfs' 1974 Model of Facebook: An Introduction

This short essay, forthcoming in Competition Policy International, summarizes and evaluates Jeffrey Rohlfs’ 1974 Bell Journal paper, “A Theory of Interdependent Demand for a Telecommunications Service.” Rohlfs’ work helped create a large literature on markets with network externalities in which demand decisions have long-lasting consequences, a literature that has informed competition policy. But Rohlfs assumed that demand-side decisions did not have long-lasting consequences. Social networking and Internet-based markets of this sort are increasingly important but have not been extensively studied. While they may pose interesting antitrust challenges, they are almost certainly not the challenges to which the post-Rohlfs literature pointed

Evaluating the liberalization process on Telecommunications services for EU countries

This paper investigates the main determinants of Telecommunications demand for European Union (EU) countries using a panel data set for 19 EU countries over the period 1991-2010, capturing the years before and after the liberalization process. The goal is to clarify whether any changes in the demand of Telecommunications, as expressed by volume of traffic in local, mobile and international market segments, are attributed to regulatory process or to some other major drivers, taking also into account the relevant price elasticities. It turns out that the regulatory process does not seem to have significant impact on demand for Telecommunications services for the first period of liberalization

Competition in Industries Recently Deregulated in Japan

Deregulation in Japan has been caused by both external and internal factors. External factors include requests by the United States and the European Community, where deregulation measures were extensively implemented in order to facilitate these countries\u27 enterprises access into Japan\u27s market. Internal factors include the necessity for the privatization of state or public corporations in order to utilize private initiative to its fullest extent and for the reduction of differences between domestic and international prices

Stochastic user behaviour modelling and network simulation for resource management in cooperation with mobile telecommunications and broadcast networks

The latest generations of telecommunications networks have been designed to deliver higher data rates than widely used second generation telecommunications networks, providing flexible communication capabilities that can deliver high quality video images. However, these new generations of telecommunications networks are interference limited, impairing their performance in cases of heavy traffic and high usage. This limits the services offered by a telecommunications network operator to those that the operator is confident their network can meet the demand for. One way to lift this constraint would be for the mobile telecommunications network operator to obtain the cooperation of a broadcast network operator so that during periods when the demand for the service is too high for the telecommunications network to meet, the service can be transferred to the broadcast network. In the United Kingdom the most recent telecommunications networks on the market are third generation UMTS networks while the terrestrial digital broadcast networks are DVB-T networks. This paper proposes a way for UMTS network operators to forecast the traffic associated with high demand services intended to be deployed on the UMTS network and when demand requires to transfer it to a cooperating DVB-T network. The paper aims to justify to UMTS network operators the use of a DVB-T network as a support for a UMTS network by clearly showing how using a DVB-T network to support it can increase the revenue generated by their network

Improved decision for a resource-efficient fusion scheme in cooperative spectrum sensing

Paper presented at at 2015 International Workshop on Telecommunications (IWT), 14th to 17th of June, Santa Rita do Sapucai, Brazil. Abstract Recently, a novel decision fusion scheme for cooperative spectrum sensing was proposed, aiming at saving resources in the reporting channel transmissions. Secondary users are allowed to report their local decisions through the symbols of binary modulations, at the same time and with the same carrier frequencies. As a consequence, the transmitted symbols add incoherently at the fusion center, forming a larger set of symbols in which a subset is associated to the presence of the primary signal, and another subset is associated to the absence of such a signal. A Bayesian decision criterion with uniform prior was applied for discriminating these subsets. In this paper we propose a modified decision rule in which the target probabilities of detection and false alarm are taken into account to produce a large performance improvement over the original decision criterion. This improvement comes with practically no cost in complexity and does not demand the knowledge of any additional information when compared to the original rule