Access Pricing, Competition, and Incentives to Migrate From "Old" to "New" Technology

In this paper, we analyze the incentives of an incumbent and an entrant to migrate from an "old" technology to a "new" technology, and discuss how the terms of wholesale access affect this migration. We show that the coverage of the new technology varies non-monotonically with the access price of the old technology: a higher access charge on the legacy network pushes the entrant firm to invest more, but has an ambiguous effect on the incumbent's investments, due to two conflicting effects: the wholesale revenue effect, and the retail-level migration effect. When the new technology is also subject to access provision, we find that migration from the old to the new generation network at the wholesale level can be incentivized if a positive correlation between the access prices (to the two old and new generation networks) is maintaine

Access regulation and the transition from copper to fiber networks in telecoms

In this paper we study the impact of different forms of access obligations on firms' incentives to migrate from the legacy copper network to ultra-fast broadband infrastructures. We analyze three different kinds of regulatory interventions: geographical regulation of access to copper networks-where access prices are differentiated depending on whether or not an alternative fiber network has been deployed; access obligations on fiber networks and its interplay with wholesale copper prices; and, finally, a mandatory switch-off of the legacy copper network-to foster the transition to the higher quality fiber networks. Trading-off the different static and dynamic goals, the paper provides guidelines and suggestions for policy makers' decision