Deployment of broadband, particularly, FTTx, is now one of major policy objectives in many countries, including Japan, Korea, and the U.S., for example. The U.S. announced a National Broadband Plan which aimed at providing 100 million households with access to 100 Mbps broadband services by...

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...

The paper assesses the scope for competition inducing infrastructure regulation in furthering the diffusion of innovation. The paper uses data on the adoption of broadband services comprising a global panel of 167 countries. The effects of different regulatory provisions are assessed. The result...

Next generation access networks (NGAN) will support a renewed electronic communication market where main opportunities lie in the provision of ubiquitous broadband connectivity, applications and content. From their deployment it is - much - expected a wealth of innovations. Within this framework...

Each year the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development produces a report on foreign direct investment (FDI). This report highlights trends on FDI, and identifies the world's largest transnational corporation (TNC). Prominent among the largest TNS are telecommunication companies such as...

The World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC) serves as a forum to negotiate, review, and revise the Radio Regulations (RR), an international treaty and one of the most difficult regulations for radiocommunication services. RR is complex since it includes intergovernmental issues in relation to...

This paper deals with the relationship between the traditional fixed-line, mobile and Voice over IP telephony in the EU.We estimate the supply and demand for fixed-line telephony using data on 25 EU member states for the 2006:Q2 - 2011:Q4 period. Employing instrumental variable approach, we...

The Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC) has recently proposed a framework to assess the reasonableness of traffic management (TM) practices. This paper discusses BEREC's proposal from a network economic perspective focusing on the underlying concepts of congestion,...

For many years electronic communications has been one of the most important areas of policy intervention for the European Union. Liberalisation and privatisation of the telecommunications industry have been very important topics of the policy debate in the two decades starting from 1990 to 2010....

Competition policy attempts to address the potential for market failure by encouraging competition in service markets. Often, in wireless communication service markets, national regulatory authorities seek to encourage entry via the spectrum assignment process. Instruments used include the...