Access Regulation and the Adoption of VoIP

In this paper, we analyze the effect of access regulation and retail price regulation of PSTN networks on the adoption of a new technology in the form of VoIP. The introduction of packet-switched telephony in the form of VoIP raises concerns about current regulatory practice of access, which has been designed for traditional telephony on PSTN networks. In particular, we show that with endogenous consumer choice between PSTN and VoIP telephony, higher prices for terminating access to the PSTN network make VoIP less likely to succeed and lead to lower profits of operators that offer VoIP telephony exclusively.