System quality, user satisfaction, and perceived net benefits of mobile broadband services

The continued decline of voice revenues is pushing mobile operators in Taiwan turn into data and content services for exploring new revenue opportunities and raising ARPU. This study aims to discuss the critical determinants of the internet user's adoption of 3.5G mobile broadband services in Taiwan. The theoretical framework employed in the study is Information System Success Model (DeLone & McLean, 2003; Chae et al.,2002), which is operationally defined with mobile web-services measurement scales. The study attempts to identify how the system quality of 3.5G mobile broadband services affects the customer satisfaction and their perceived net benefit. With the affordable mobile broadband connectivity, 3.5 G access or HSDPA in Taiwan has played a major role in the burgeoning mobile Internet market. HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access) could be viewed as an advanced version of WCDMA wireless network. HSDPA ideally provides mobile data services up to 14.4 Mbps for the downlinks and up to 5.8 Mbps for the uplinks. According to TWNIC, the number of cell phone subscribers in Taiwan has grown up to 23 million by March 2009 with a 100% penetration rate Yet, among cell phone subscribers there were only 1.6 million users adopting mobile broadband services. --Mobile Broadband Services,IS Success Model,Customer Satisfaction,Net Benefits

Mobile Broadband Expansion Calls for More Spectrum or Base Stations - Analysis of the Value of Spectrum and the Role of Spectrum Aggregation

The breakthrough for mobile broadband is taking the mobile communications industry into a new phase. The number of mobile broadband users in the world exceeds 400 million, and the share of the population in Western Europe with mobile broadband is around 10 per cent and over 15 percent in Austria and Sweden. This development has been propelled by the extensive diffusion of mobile modems (dongles) for laptops and smartphones given users ubiquitous access to mobile internet. Consequently, traffic volumes in the mobile networks have grown immensely, and the mobile data traffic surpassed the mobile voice traffic in the world by the end of 2009, and in for example Sweden, over 75 percent of the mobile traffic is data. --

Determinants of Mobile Broadband Affordability: A Cross-National Comparison

There is little understanding of what determines mobile broadband affordability in different countries. We address this problem by exploring to what extent policy, regulation, government, and governance affect mobile broadband affordability. Our results show that when controlling for wealth, education and other factors, competition to provide mobile services, financial investment in information and communication technologies (ICTs), and income inequality are all important variables in determining mobile broadband affordability. Our findings related to financial investment suggest that service providers and other stakeholders are still recouping the cost of deploying the infrastructure necessary to provide mobile services, and have not yet achieved the economy of scale required for the price of mobile broadband to begin to fall. Although policy initiatives and income inequality are important determinants of mobile broadband affordability, we find no evidence that political structure and processes (e.g., the level of democracy), telecommunications regulation, or public-sector governance matter

Mobile Data Roaming and Incentives for Investment in Rural Broadband Infrastructure

Mobile broadband Internet access is highly important to the American economy and millions of users. There were almost 200 million mobile broadband connections by the end of 2013 in the United States, far more than the number of fixed broadband connections (FCC, 2014a, Table 1). The economic activity created by the provision and usage of mobile broadband is sizeable, and has been documented at the national level (Gruber and Koutroumpis, 2011; Thompson and Garbacz, 2011; Katz, 2012) and specifically for rural areas (Whitacre, Gallardo, and Strover, 2014). The benefits of mobile broadband—and indeed the entire broadband ecosystem—depend on investment in deploying and upgrading network infrastructure by broadband providers. Thus investment in mobile wireless infrastructure plays a vitally important role in sustaining the growth of the industry and the economy. Investment is also the means by which robust facilities-based competition among mobile broadband providers develops, to the benefit of consumers who enjoy more options, greater wireless coverage, and lower prices. The investigation here of the consequences of policy in the United States toward mobile data roaming begins in the next section with discussion of the general importance of investment in infrastructure for mobile broadband

The Broadband Digital Divide and the Benefits of Mobile Broadband for Minorities

This study sets out the facts regarding broadband deployment and usage in the US and the particular promise of mobile broadband for minorities. Fixed broadband is nearly ubiquitous and most people have access to four or more mobile broadband providers. Growth in fixed broadband usage is leveling off, while mobile broadband usage growth remains robust. Blacks and Hispanics generally have fewer fixed broadband options but more mobile broadband providers available. Gaps in broadband usage overall (fixed and mobile combined) for minorities persist and are quite large. Matching estimators show that lagging broadband adoption among minority groups is not fully accounted for by demographic and economic characteristics. Mobile broadband holds particular promise for minorities regarding social, medical, and economic inclusion, and these communities have relatively greater reliance on mobile forms of broadband. Two important findings are that 1) blacks are more likely to access the Internet using a mobile phone than whites (after controlling for demographic differences between the groups), and 2) there is no significant gap in mobile broadband usage between minorities and whites by either of the two measures of usage considered. These results can set the backdrop for discussion of US broadband policy

Impact of mobile broadband in the mobile telecommunication industry

The goal of this master’s thesis is to answer to the following research question: What are the relationships between mobile broadband and mobile telecommunication revenues and mobile broadband and market structure? My approach is econometric in nature. I developed two equations with the purpose of analyzing the impact of mobile broadband in the telecommunication industry and used the STATA program to regress the different models. For the first equation, I conducted a panel data approach of 34 OECD countries over the period 2009 and 2013. For the second equation, I used a cross section method of the same 34 OECD countries and for the year 2013. First, the results suggest that there exists a positive relationship between mobile broadband subscriptions and mobile telecommunication revenues which, in relative terms, is more sizeable than that of voice calls. This result demonstrates the growing importance of broadband mobile traffic for mobile operators. Second, there appears not to exist a statistically significant relationship between mobile broadband prices and market structure, an opposite result to that of Genakos, Valletti and Verboven (2017) for the mobile industry as a whole. This suggests that different and novel forms of competition may underlie the provision of mobile broadband services

The economic impacts of mobile broadband on the Australian economy, from 2006 to 2013

Executive summary The Australian Communications and Media Authority (the ACMA) has commissioned the CIE and Analysys Mason to investigate the economic impacts arising from mobile broadband in Australia. Mobile broadband means the variety of ways an internet service is delivered via a mobile network, typically comprising mobile wireless internet services provided via a dongle, USB modem or data card service, or mobile phone handset internet services. This report sets out the main economic impacts of mobile broadband from 2006 to 2013. It does not consider the future economic impacts of mobile broadband or how the impacts of mobile broadband would be affected by changes in Government policy. Mobile communications, of which mobile broadband is a part, is a small component of the Australian economy, accounting for only 0.2 per cent of employment and 0.5 per cent of economic activity. However, its small size belies its impact. Mobile broadband has wrought substantial change across the Australian economy and has been taken up rapidly by Australian households and businesses. The impacts of mobile broadband are largely productivity impacts. Productivity is the amount of inputs, such as labour and capital, required to produce goods and services. In the long term, improving productivity is one of the main ways that we can improve material standards of living. Yet over the last decade, Australia’s multi-factor productivity — the amount produced given the amount of hours worked and capital employed in production — has not increased. There have been various interpretations of Australia’s productivity malaise. Partly the lack of productivity growth reflects specific issues with the mining, electricity and water sectors. However, as the Reserve Bank notes: “The most widely accepted explanation for the acceleration and subsequent slowing in productivity growth over the past two decades relates to the gradual waning of the impetus to productivity growth initiated by the economic policy reforms of the 1980s and 1990s.” (D’Arcy, P. and L. Gustafsson 2012, “Australia’s productivity performance and real incomes”, Reserve Bank of Australia Bulletin, June). During the mid-1990s, technological innovation in information and communications technology (ICT) coincided with productivity enhancing impacts of economic policy reforms such as trade liberalisation and National Competition Policy. ICT was a small component of Australia’s strong productivity performance, contributing around 10 to 20 per cent of the uplift in Australia’s productivity growth. The impacts of mobile broadband have coincided with a very different Australian productivity environment. Mobile broadband has been moving against the tide, unlike the productivity impacts of ICT. The substantial positive impacts of mobile broadband on the Australian economy and productivity have been more than offset by the broader productivity environment. Without mobile broadband, this means that Australia’s productivity and economic growth would have been lower still and that the Australian economy would be $33.8 billion smaller in 2013. Further, Australian households would have consumed$652 per person less in goods and services than they actually consumed in the absence of mobile broadband. These very substantial impacts of mobile broadband reflect the productivity growth within the mobile communications sector and the impacts of mobile broadband reported by over 1000 Australian businesses operating across all sectors of the economy. The overlap between the impacts of technological change and the impacts of government policy are directly relevant to the mobile communications sector. Spectrum, the allocation of which is currently largely at the Australian Government’s direction, has been noted by the mobile broadband sector as a critical issue. The allocation of spectrum will be one issue that could potentially constrain or reduce the future economic value of mobile broadband