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,...

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are an important determinant of productivity growth and innovation. This study examines the effects of sector regulation on innovation in telecommunications and related information industries. A typology of innovation processes in ICT industries...

This paper provides an empirical analysis how tariff diversity affects broadband uptake, utilizing a new data set with 1497 fixed-line and 2158 mobile broadband tariffs from 91 countries across the globe. An instrumental variable approach is applied to estimate the demand for fixed broadband...

This paper develops a structural model which allows estimating the impact of regulatory decisions looking for the setting of download-speed standards on market structure and performance. We characterize a setting under which quality standards improve both service quality and availability. As to...

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...

Using longitudinal time-series data, this paper analyzes the causes of the recent sharp increase in household expenditure on telecommunications in South Korea with a linear approximate almost ideal demand system (LA/AIDS) model. The main results are as follows. First, Korean household demand for...

The Japanese mobile market has recently shown a remarkable growth in the last decade, with more than 106.2 million 3G (3rd Generation, or W-CDMA) subscribers and 4.4 million 2G (2nd Generation, or PDC) as of December 2009. This paper attempts to analyze factors promoting Japanese mobile phone,...

Cloud computing has recently shifted into the center of attention of Telecommuications Companies. Deutsche Telekom, for example, just announced the importance of cloud computing as one of their leading growth sectors (Deutsche Telekom Press Release, 2010). Also other important telecommunication...

In order to create incentives for Internet traffic providers not to discriminate with respect to certain applications on the basis of network capacity requirements, the concept of market driven network neutrality is introduced. Its basic characteristics are that all applications are bearing the...

This paper studies a model of the Internet broadband market as a platform in order to show how different pricing schemes from the so-called net neutrality may increased economic efficiency by allowing more investment of access providers and enhancing consumers surplus and social welfare.