Subscriber churn in the Australian ISP market

Rapid growth in Internet use, combined with easy market entry by Internet service providers (ISPs), has resulted in a highly competitive supply of Internet services. Australian ISPs range in size from a few large national operators to niche ISPs focused on specialised service. With many ISPs currently not profitable, subscriber retention is an important aspect of survival. This study develops a model which relates the probability of subscriber churn to various service attributes and subscriber characteristics. Estimation results show that churn probability is positively associated with monthly ISP expenditure, but inversely related to household income. Pricing also matters with subscribers preferring ISPs which offer flat-rate pricing arrangements.

Innovation and the Evolution of Market Structure for Internet Access in the United States

How and why did the U.S. commercial Internet access market structure evolve during its first decade? Commercial Internet access market structure arose from a propitious combination of inherited market structures from communications and computing, where a variety of firms already flourished and entrepreneurial norms prevailed. This setting nurtured innovative behavior across such key features as pricing, operational practices, and geographic coverage. Inherited regulatory decisions in communications markets had a nurturing effect on innovative activity. On-going regulatory decisions also shaped the market’s evolution, sometimes nurturing innovation and sometimes not. This narrative and analysis informs conjectures about several unique features of U.S. market structure and innovative behavior. It also informs policy debates today about the role of regulation in nurturing or discouraging innovation behavior.

The Beginnings and Prospective Ending of “End-to-End”: An Evolutionary Perspective On the Internet’s Architecture

The technology of “the Internet” is not static. Although its “end-to- end” architecture has made this “connection-less” communications system readily “extensible,” and highly encouraging to innovation both in hardware and software applications, there are strong pressures for engineering changes. Some of these are wanted to support novel transport services (e.g. voice telephony, real-time video); others would address drawbacks that appeared with opening of the Internet to public and commercial traffic - e.g., the difficulties of blocking delivery of offensive content, suppressing malicious actions (e.g. “denial of service” attacks), pricing bandwidth usage to reduce congestion. The expected gains from making “improvements” in the core of the network should be weighed against the loss of the social and economic benefits that derive from the “end-to-end” architectural design. Even where technological “fixes” can be placed at the networks’ edges, the option remains to search for alternative, institutional mechanisms of governing conduct in cyberspace.