Regulation of NGN: Structural Separation, Access Regulation, or No Regulation at All?

Since the introduction of Next Generation Networks (NGNs) by telecommunication network operators, national regulators have begun to adapt their access regulation regimes to the new technological conditions. The regulatory reactions gravitate towards three distinct regulatory trajectories: unregulated competition, access regulation, and structural separation. We first analyze the extent of market power in access Networks in NGNs from a technological perspective. Second, we use case studies to identify patterns between technological and market conditions and regulators' reactions in selected countries. We find that market power in the access network is likely to prevail. Regulatory reactions differ with the extent of infrastructure competition and the regulators position in the trade-off between promoting investment and protecting competition.Next Generation Network, deregulation, access regulation, structural separation

Future broadband access network challenges

Copyright @ 2010 IEEEThe optical and wireless communication systems convergence will activate the potential capacity of photonic technology for providing the expected growth in interactive video, voice communication and data traffic services that are cost effective and a green communication service. The last decade growth of the broadband internet projects the number of active users will grow to over 2 billion globally by the end of 2014. Enabling the abandoned capacity of photonic signal processing is the promising solution for seamless transportation of the future consumer traffic demand. In this paper, the future traffic growth of the internet, wireless worldwide subscribers, and the end-users during the last and next decades is investigated. The challenges of the traditional access networks and Radio over Fiber solution are presented

Regulation of NGN: Structural Separation, Access Regulation, or No Regulation at All?

Since the introduction of Next Generation Networks (NGNs) by telecommunication network operators, national regulators have begun to adapt their access regulation regimes to the new technological conditions. The regulatory reactions gravitate towards three distinct regulatory trajectories: unregulated competition, access regulation, and structural separation. We first analyze the extent of market power in access Networks in NGNs from a technological perspective. Second, we use case studies to identify patterns between technological and market conditions and regulators' reactions in selected countries. We find that market power in the access network is likely to prevail. Regulatory reactions differ with the extent of infrastructure competition and the regulators position in the trade-off between promoting investment and protecting competitionNext Generation Network, deregulation, access regulation, structural separation.

A Dynamic Macroeconomic Model for the US Telecommunications Industry

Dynamic models have been used in most businesses serving different purposes. The increased changes of the Telecommunications environment have created a dynamic industry emerging new dynamic economic models. We investigated the Telecom industry by conducting macroeconomic and infrastructure analysis. However, this paper uses recent data from the Telecommunications industry to reveal the infrastructure trends and predict the US wireless growth. The analysis is focused on several factors such as the infrastructure described by the Teledensity, the employment and the Telecom revenues in comparison with the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The purpose of this analysis is to understand the industry’s behavior during a specific period of time, 1984-2003, propose an appropriate economic dynamic model, wireless oriented that identifies the current driving forces and detects the impact of some critical events and trends.Dynamic Economic Model, Macroeconomic Analysis, Telecom Act, Teledensity

A business planning framework for WiMAX applications

Mobile networking refers to wireless technologies which provide communications between devices. Applications for mobile networking have a broad scope as they can be applied to many situations in either industrial or commercial sectors. The challenge for firms is to better match market-induced variability to the organizational issues and systems necessary for technological innovation. This chapter develops a business planning framework for mobile networking applications. This framework recognises the fluidity of the situation when trying to anticipate and model emerging wireless applications. The business planning framework outlined in this chapter is a generic model which can be used by companies to assess the business case for applications utilizing mobile networking technologies

Techno-economic viability of integrating satellite communication in 4G networks to bridge the broadband digital divide

Bridging the broadband digital divide between urban and rural areas in Europe is one of the main targets of the Digital Agenda for Europe. Though many technological options are proposed in literature, satellite communication has been identified as the only possible solution for the most rural areas, due to its global coverage. However, deploying an end-to-end satellite solution might, in some cases, not be cost-effective. The aim of this study is to give insights into the economic effectiveness of integrating satellite communications into 4G networks in order to connect the most rural areas (also referred to as white areas) in Europe. To this end, this paper proposes a converged solution that combines satellite communication as a backhaul network with 4G as a fronthaul network to bring enhanced broadband connectivity to European rural areas, along with a techno-economic model to analyse the economic viability of this integration. The model is based on a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) model for 5 years, taking into account both capital and operational expenditures, and aims to calculate the TCO as well as the Average Cost Per User (ACPU) for the studied scenarios. We evaluate the suggested model by simulating a hypothetical use case for two scenarios. The first scenario is based on a radio access network connecting to the 4G core network via a satellite link. Results for this scenario show high operational costs. In order to reduce these costs, we propose a second scenario, consisting of caching the popular content on the edge to reduce the traffic carried over the satellite link. This scenario demonstrates a significant operational cost decrease (more than 60%), which also means a significant ACPU decrease. We evaluate the robustness of the results by simulating for a range of population densities, hereby also providing an indication of the economic viability of our proposed solution across a wider range of areas

Value Creation in a QoE Environment

User behavior of multimedia services currently undergoes strong changes. This is reflected in several recent trends, e.g. the increase of rich media content consumption, preferences for more individual and personalized services and the higher sensitivity of end users for quality issues. These changes will eventually lead to strong changes in network traffic characteristics: rising congestion in peak times and less availability of bandwidth for the individual user. As a result, the quality as perceived by the end-user will decrease if network operators and service providers do not anticipate the required changes for the network. Measurable network requirements such as available video and speech quality, security and reliability are addressed by technologies that are commonly summed up in the Quality of Service (QoS) concept. However, the end-users' perception of quality is only reflected in the wider concept of Quality of Experience (QoE). This takes the measurable network requirements into account as well as customer needs, wants and preferences. For the implementation of QoE technologies several network components need to be added or changed resulting in high capital expenditures. Yet, it is not clear if these costs can be compensated with efficiency increases. Thus, new revenue streams for the network operator are necessary to incentivize investments in QoE technologies. In this paper we address four new value creation models that can serve as basis for more elaborated business models for network operators and other actors. We show how interest in QoE of the user, the content provider, the service provider and the advertiser induces new revenue streams. These models are embedded in five possible future QoE scenarios that reveal regulation, end user quality sensibility and end-to-end support as major issues for the future. --Business Models,Quality of Experience (QoE),Quality of Service (QoS),Value Creation