Is America Exporting Misguided Telecommunications Policy? The U.S.-Japan Telecom Trade Negotiations and Beyond

Global telecommunications markets have traditionally been closed to foreign trade and investment. Recent World Trade Organization negotiations resulted in a Basic Telecommunications agreement that sought to construct a multilateral framework to reverse that trend and begin opening telecom markets worldwide. Regrettably, this new WTO framework is quite ambiguous and open to pro-regulatory interpretations by member states. In fact, during recent bilateral trade negotiations with Japan, U.S. government officials adopted the position that the new framework allowed them to demand that the Japanese government adopt very specific regulatory provisions regarding telecom network interconnection and pricing policies. The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative argued that Japanese officials should require their domestic telecom providers to share their networks with rivals at a generously discounted price to encourage greater resale competition. Those interconnection and line-sharing rules were borrowed directly from the U.S. Telecommunications Act of 1996, a piece of legislation that remains the subject of intense debate within the United States. Good evidence now exists that those rules generally retard net-work investment and innovation by encouraging infrastructure sharing over facilities-based investment. Consequently, the USTR has generated resentment on the part of Japan and other trading partners as it has attempted to force them to adopt heavy-handed telecommunications mandates that have very little to do with legitimate free-trade policy. The USTR must discontinue efforts to impose American telecommunications regulations on other countries as part of free-trade negotiations and should instead focus on reforming or eliminating the most serious barriers to foreign direct investment both here and abroad

Cooperative smartphone relay selection based on fair power utilization for network coverage extension

This paper presents a relay selection algorithm based on fair battery power utilization for extending mobile network coverage and capacity by using a cooperative communication strategy where mobile devices can be utilized as relays. Cooperation improves the network performance for mobile terminals, either by providing access to out-of-range devices or by facilitating multi-path network access to connected devices. In this work, we assume that all mobile devices can benefit from using other mobile devices as relays and investigate the fairness of relay selection algorithms. We point out that signal strength based relay selection inevitably leads to unfair relay selection and devise a new algorithm that is based on fair utilization of power resources on mobile devices. We call this algorithm Credit based Fair Relay Selection (CF-RS) and in this paper show through simulation that the algorithm results in fair battery power utilization, while providing similar data rates compared with traditional approaches. We then extend the solution to demonstrate that adding incentives for relay operation adds clear value for mobile devices in the case they require relay service. Typically, mobile devices represent self-interested users who are reluctant to cooperate with other network users, mainly due to the cost in terms of power and network capacity. In this paper, we present an incentive based solution which provides clear mutual benefit for mobile devices and demonstrate this benefit in the simulation of symmetric and asymmetric network topologies. The CF-RS algorithm achieves the same performance in terms of achievable data rate, Jain's fairness index and utility of end devices in both symmetric and asymmetric network configurations

Multicast Mobility in Mobile IP Version 6 (MIPv6) : Problem Statement and Brief Survey

Publisher PD

The radio spectrum : opportunities and challenges for the developing world

The radio spectrum is a major component of the telecommunications infrastructure that underpins the information society. Spectrum management, however, has not kept up with major changes in technology, business practice, and economic policy during the past two decades. Traditional spectrum management practice is predicated on the spectrum being a limited resource that must be apportioned among uses and users by government administration. For many years this model worked well, but more recently the spectrum has come under pressure from rapid demand growth for wireless services and changing patterns of use. This has led to growing technical and economic inefficiencies, as well as obstacles to technological innovation. Two alternative approaches are being tried, one driven by the market (spectrum property rights) and another driven by technology innovation (commons). Practical solutions are evolving that combine some features of both. Wholesale replacement of current practice is unlikely, but the balance between administration, property rights, and commons is clearly shifting. Although the debate on spectrum management reform is mainly taking place in high-income countries, it is deeply relevant to developing countries as well.Broadcast and Media,Roads&Highways,Climate Change,Montreal Protocol,ICT Policy and Strategies