It became clear early on that UMTS, also known as 3G (third-generation mobile phone systems), would be a key technology for profitable markets of the future. However UMTS technology offers some major advantages that can be demonstrated under laboratory conditions but which it will not be...

The current problems in mobile telephony are leading critics to make overly pessimistic predictions that 3G – the third-generation mobile phone system – will never become profitable. However, the resulting calls not to introduce 3G and instead directly back alternative wireless technologies...

In a globally networked economy, the telecommunications sector – which was long in the hands of a state-run company – must not close its eyes to competition. All the same, Germany was late in starting to deregulate the industry and so far has concentrated more on competition among service...

The market for information and communication technologies is changing rapidly. Products and applications that used to be completely separate are becoming almost interchangeable. Sweeping change lies ahead in voice and data telephony: the fixed-line telephone network faces new competition from...

Thanks to a recent and vast empirical literature, we know in details how the most popular open source projects are organized and why they succeed. However open source is not only Linux: in this paper we use a large data-set obtained from SourceForge.net to estimate the main determinants of the...

This paper analyses the impact of public policies supporting open source software (OSS). Users can be divided between those who know about the existence of OSS, the "informed" adopters, and the "uninformed" ones; the presence of uniformed users yields to market failures that justify government...

The development of what one might call 'modern' systems of information and communication began with the Gutenberg printing press in the 15th century, and progressed through the prepaid postal system, electric telegraph and telephone in the 19th century, radio and television broadcasting in the...

This paper finds that the rapid update of information and communication technologies contributed to Australia’s strong productivity performance in the 1990s and the contribution to labour productivity growth was at least as strong as it was in the US. Australia generated a productivity...