This paper investigates the incentives to invest in improving the quality (as distinguished to investment in a new activity) in telecommunication industry using the empirical example of wireless markets. We highlight that investment incentives are positively related to the potential for...

The relationship between technical progress and price competition is a controversial issue in economics. This paper highlights the fact that investment in technical progress is an authentic type of competition which benefits the consumers rather than the industry. This type of competition exists...

Typically, incumbent providers enjoy a demand-side advantage over any entrant. However, market entrants may enjoy a supply-side advantage in costs over the incumbent, since they are more efficient or operate on innovative technologies, such as the voice of internet protocol (VoIP) telephony....

In this paper, we examine welfare implications of switching from a neutrality regime to a network management regime. While in the former a network provider or an integrated ISP should transmit data with a-bit-is-a-bit principle, in the latter it is allowed to differentiate its connection quality...

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...

This paper discusses the relevant cost standard for the economic replicability test for Next-Generation Access (NGA) networks, described in the Recommendation on Costing and Non-discrimination adopted by the European Commission. We demonstrate that a cost standard that implies fully fixed and...

The development of the broadband market is a key aspect of the economic and social growth of a country. However, despite the importance and the development of broadband market in Portugal in recent years, especially with the explosion of the number of mobile broadband accesses, the studies for...