In the telecommunications industry, the ladder-of-investment approach claims that service-based competition (when entrants lease access to incumbents’ facilities) can serve as a “stepping stone” for facility-based entry (when entrants build their own infrastructures to provide services)....

Next Generation Access (NGA) networks entails significant investments but brings with it promises of a "brand new world" in telecommunications. In this paper, we provide an overview of some of its implications. In particular, we argue that it is not clear whether the "old" vertical integration...

Investments in next generation access networks (NGANs) ask for a new set of regulatory remedies. This paper contributes to this debate by focusing on three issues: the migration from the legacy copper network to the NGA infrastructure, and how wholesale pricing regulation might affect this...

This paper studies the incentives of an unregulated monopolist to undertake the socially optimal investment in NGA networks when it takes into account the fact that the NGA deployment is a two-dimensional investment decision concerning both the quality (or equivalently, technology) and the...

The review of the Universal Service Obligation (USO) has recently been debated in the European Union (EU). Under discussion there was the extension of the current universal service definition to include broadband access, for which some theoretical and empirical support exists. In fact the...

To move towards an information society is a political goal of governments around the world. To achieve this goal, high-capacity broadband networks are regarded as fundamental infrastructure. An increase in broadband growth in a country results in increased opportunities for its people to...

In this paper, we analyze the specific national broadband plans which have been developed by some European governments to foster the deployment of next generation access networks, namely in France, Italy, and Portugal. In particular, we discuss the strategies adopted to achieve wide fibre...

A vertically integrated firm that wholesales to its retail rivals can, if it has sufficient market power, set the margin between its retail and wholesale prices so as to harm its rivals. Conventionally, an imputation test is used to determine whether such behavior is being undertaken. Such tests...

In many countries, Next Generation Access networks (NGA) deployment and penetration rate proceed at a slower pace than expected. We argue that an ex ante contractual arrangement among access Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Content Providers (CPs), which builds on the complementarity...

In this paper, we analyze the specific national broadband plans which have been developed by some European governments to foster the deployment of next generation access networks, namely in France, Italy, and Portugal. In particular, we discuss the strategies adopted to achieve wide fibre...