16,181 research outputs found

    Mandatory Unbundling and Irreversible Investment in Telecom Networks

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    This paper addresses the impact on investment incentives of the network sharing arrangements mandated by the Telecommunications Act of 1996, with a focus on the implications of irreversible investment. Although the goal is to promote competition, the sharing rules now in place reduce incentives to build new networks or upgrade existing ones. Such investments are irreversible -- they involve sunk costs. The basic framework adopted by regulators allows entrants to utilize such facilities at prices reflecting what it would cost a new, efficient, large-scale network to be built. Such sharing opportunities are extensive, covering virtually the entire suite of network services provided, and extremely flexible, as the entrant can rent facilities in small increments for short duration, with no long-term contracts required. Because the entrant does not bear the sunk costs, this leads to an asymmetric allocation of risk and return that is not properly accounted for in the pricing of network services, which creates a significant investment disincentive.

    Assessing the Economic Gains from Telecom Competition

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    This paper develops and simulates a dynamic model of strategic telecom competition. The goal is to understand how regulatory policy, particularly relative to lease charges for local network elements, affects telecom competition, investment, retail prices, and consumer welfare. The model assumes two products, local voice service and data (broadband), and three types of players the regional Bell operating companies, referred to as incumbent local exchange carriers (ILECs), cable companies (Cables), and competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs). The game begins with a) ILECs established in each county with respect to the provision of local voice and data services and b) Cables established in roughly half of the counties with respect to the provision of data.There are one-time fixed costs of entering a county, product- and period-specific costs of operating in a county, and marginal costs of supplying each product. Economies of scope reduce the fixed entry and operating costs of supplying both products in a given county at a given point in time. Finally, in supplying telecom services in a given county, CLECs may enter by leasing ILEC infrastructure at specified access rates. The requirement that ILECs allow CLECs to lease their local network facilities was established in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 as part of a quid pro quo that promised ILECs entry into the long distance market. But the ILECs continue to contest the quid. The ILECs support their position by suggesting that leased access reduces telecom investment and output and raises telecom prices. Our model considers the entire range of options available to each of the players, but it reaches the opposite conclusion. Indeed, we find thatif UNE-P rates were set at the Supreme Court-approved total element long-run incremental cost (TELRIC) levels, telecom investment and employment outlays would increase by over one fifth in counties containing the majority of the U.S. population and by over 30 percent in counties containing almost a third of the population. The present value of telecom outlays over the next 5 and 20 years would rise by 71billionand71 billion and 155 billion, respectively. On average, the switch from actual to TELRIC UNE rates would lower local phone rates across the country's 3108 counties by 57peryear,generatingannualtotalsavingstoconsumersof57 per year, generating annual total savings to consumers of 15 billion. Almost two fifths of the population would experience reductions in local phone rates of 20 percent or more. Over one fifth would experience rate reductions of 30 percent or more. These findings of price reductions are based on a fairly conservative parameterization of our model with respect to the specification of true ILEC and CLEC incremental long-run production costs.

    Subsidies, Market Closure, Cross-Border Investment, and Effects on Competition: The Case of FDI in the Telecommunications Sector

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    Telecommunications long was a sector where sellers of services operated in protected local markets, where law and government regulation created and enforced barriers to entry, especially by foreign firms. In many nations, in fact, the provision of telecommunications services was reserved for state-owned monopoly suppliers. During the late 1980s and through the 1990s, however, many of these barriers have been removed while formerly state-owned firms have been partially or wholly privatized. This has in turn engendered some cross entry by telecom service providers; firms that once were purely domestic in the scope of their operations thus have become multinational. During the summer of 2000, however, US Senator Ernest Hollings, with co-sponsorship of 29 other US Senators, introduced a bill (S.2793) in the US Congress that would have effectively blocked non-US telecommunications service providers from acquiring US telecom firms if the former were state-owned, or even only partly state-owned. The bill was aimed specifically at the proposed acquisition of US mobile telecommunications service provider Voice Stream by the German firm Deutsche Telekom (DT), but the language of the bill would have served to block virtually any non-US state-owned firm in the telecom sector from buying a US firm. While the bill did not become law, it reflected a long history of efforts in Congress to prevent US firms from being acquired by state-owned non-US firms (e.g., a legislative bill to do this had been introduced by Senator Frank Murkowski during the late 1980s, and while this bill also failed to be passed into law, some provisions from the bill were incorporated into the Exon-Florio legislation that was first enacted as a temporary measure in 1988 but subsequently made part of US permanent law in 1992). The Hollings bill was doubtlessly motivated in part by xenophobia (Senator Hollings is himself of the American generation that fought Germany during World War II). But it was also motivated, as was the Murkowski bill a decade earlier, by fears that subsidies and/or monopoly profits accruing to state-owned firms in their home markets might be used to affect operations in the US market to the detriment of locally-owned competitors. The extreme case of such behavior would be predatory pricing by the state-owned firm aimed at bankrupting its competitors, where temporary losses created by below-cost pricing in the US market would be offset by subsidies or monopoly profits in the home market. The ultimate goal of the predatory firm would be to establish a monopoly in the United States. In fact, the Hollings bill was shelved in part because DT was able to establish that it was neither a recipient of significant subsidies in Germany nor a monopoly service provider in the German market (although the firm once held a statutory monopoly there, the market has been opened to competition and some new entry has occurred). Also figuring in the shelving of the bill was argumentation that competition in the US market for wireless telecom services would be enhanced by the entry of DT. However, fears have persisted about the possibly deleterious effects of subsidies or monopoly profits garnered by a firm in its home market on competition in a geographically separate market in which that firm (or a subsidiary of that firm) is a seller. Indeed, the issues raised by the Hollings bill pertain to numerous sectors in which multinational firms compete. Accordingly, the US Council of Economic Advisors was ordered by the US President following the introduction of the Hollings bill to advise on what might be the effects of such competition.

    International roaming in the EU : current overview, challenges, opportunities and solutions

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    As technology evolves and globalization continues, the need for reasonably priced roaming services has never been higher. In 2007, the European Commission (EC) introduced a first set of regulatory decisions to cap the maximal roaming fee end users have to pay for voice services. In the years after, additional price caps have been introduced for SMS and data, initially only for end users, in a later stage also for the wholesale tariff. The final step, Roaming Like at Home (RLAH), will start to take effect in June 2017; from then on end users will pay the same price (for voice, SMS and data) when roaming like in their domestic country. The effect of RLAH on the business case of each mobile operator is hard to predict, as the different national markets are extremely heterogeneous and operators face large discrepancies in terms of roaming usage and network costs due to different travelling patterns and various other reasons that cannot be harmonized (geography, economics, working force, usage history, etc.). Furthermore, competition in the telecom market will no longer be a purely national matter, as the decision to abolish roaming tariffs will fully open up cross-border competition. This paper aims at providing insights in the effect of RLAH for both the end user as well as the mobile operators. Following a literature survey approach, including an overview of the roaming regulation process from 2007 up to now, the paper discusses possible effects the RLAH initiative might trigger, going from lower wholesale prices for mobile operators to higher retail prices for end Users. Additionally, as the European Commission strives for a digital single market, this paper presents a number of technical solutions (carrier portability, software-based SIMs, cross-border IMSI, Roaming like a Local, Wi-Fi offloading) that may pose a - partial or full - alternative for roaming and explains how these may impact cross-border competition both positively and negatively. The solutions are assessed against two axes: (1) generating the best possible outcome for the end customers (in all countries) and (2) ensuring the best level playing field for (virtual) mobile operators in Europe, which will of course involve trade-offs on different levels

    License prices for financially constrained firms

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    It is often alleged that high auction prices inhibit service deployment. We investigate this claim under the extreme case of financially constrained bidders. If demand is just slightly elastic, auctions maximize consumer surplus if consumer surplus is a convex function of quantity (a common assumption), or if consumer surplus is concave and the proportion of expenditure spent on deployment is greater than one over the elasticity of demand. The latter condition appears to be true for most of the large telecom auctions in the US and Europe. Thus, even if high auction prices inhibit service deployment, auctions appear to be optimal from the consumers’ point of view
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