Fiber to the Premise (FTTP) exhibits characteristics of a natural monopoly industry. However, service level competition is possible in FTTP and can be achieved by a structural separation between network ownership and service provisioning (henceforth, referred to as a wholesale-retail split). A...

This paper provides a framework for understanding competition and industry structure in the context of Fiber to the Home (FTTH). We present engineering cost models, which indicate that FTTH is a decreasing cost industry, thereby making facilities based competition an unlikely outcome....

Several factors suggest that meaningful network neutrality rules will not be enshrined in near-term U.S. telecommunications policy. These include disagreements over the need for such rules as well as their definition, efficacy and enforceability. However, as van Schewick (2005)1 has demonstrated...

NetBill is a business model set of protocols, and software implementation for commerce in information goods and other network-delivered services. It has very low transaction costs for micropayments (around 1 cent for a 10 cent item), protects the privacy of the transaction, and is highly...

Integrating multiple services into a single network is becoming increasingly common in today’s telecommunications industry. Driven by the emergence of new applications, many of these services will be offered with guaranteed quality of service. While there are extensive studies of the...

The digitization of information goods necessitates a rethinking of their production and distribution economics. An N-good bundling model with multi-dimensional consumer preferences is developed to study the key factors that determine the optimal bundling strategy. Using analytical and empirical...

Multicast and unicast traffic share and compete for network resources. To facilitate efficient and equitable resource allocation between traffic types, this paper advocates a costbased approach to multicast pricing. When prices are set to reflect actual network resource consumption, market...