We evaluate the welfare effects of the Roam-Like-At-Home regulation, which drastically re-duced the price of accessing the mobile internet for EU residents when traveling abroad in the European Economic Area. Estimates from individual-level usage data suggest that consumer surplus increased by...

Although a growing number of regional trade agreements (RTAs) include telecommunications provisions, the collection and systematization of information on telecommunications provisions in RTAs remain limited. This paper addresses this gap by mapping and reviewing the different types of provisions...

This paper reproduces a chapter from the author’s 2018 PhD thesis ‘The Digital Donga: Universal Access and Service in South Africa (1994 - 2014)’. The author’s subsequent book Regulating Telecommunications in SA: Universal Access & Service was published by Palgrave Press in 2020, and can...

Telecommunications in South Africa is one example of the regulatory state, dating from the early 1990s and comprising the usual elements of commercial operators, ministers issuing periodic policies, a regulator, a competition authority, systems of appeal, and parliamentary oversight. Less...

This chapter deals with the imposition and execution of universal service obligations on licensees, which was a key component of South Africa’s telecommunications reform policy and legislative framework. Rollout and connectivity targets were imposed on the fixed-line (soon to be partially...

This paper focuses on telecommunications reform in South Africa in general, and its universal access and service component in particular. Policy diffusion and policy transfer provides a useful framework within which to consider how South Africa was influenced by the global telecomms reform and...

This paper provides an analytical framework based on four factors, technological advancement, market demand, government consideration, and foreign pressure. It intends to reveal the reasons behind China’s telecommunications policymaking, explicate why the government has consistently privileged...

The telecommunications market has evolved into product-differentiatedmarkets due to the varying quality of data services. Earlier work has takenonly the price into account and has not considered quality, which is, however,an essential factor. We provide a supply-demand framework considering...

The purpose of this paper is to provide an insight into integration processes in the CIS telecommunications sector, the prospects for telecom companies as potential targets for investment, the region’s transit potential, and integration of CIS countries into the regional and global information...

Although a growing number of regional trade agreements (RTAs) include telecommunications provisions, the collection and systematization of information on telecommunications provisions in RTAs remain limited. This paper addresses this gap by mapping and reviewing the different types of provisions...

Abstract: There have been recent calls for new regulation of package delivery in the EU. We provide a detailed description of the evolution of access regulation in the telecommunications industry in the EU and package delivery services in the EU to examine lessons from the telecommunications...

The newly passed German telecommunication regulation has set the deployment and sharing conditions of in-building infrastructure with the purpose of addressing the need of generating proper incentives to network operators to invest in and extend their very high capacity access networks. At the...

Achieving the EU’s ambitious 2030 connectivity targets enshrined in the proposed Path to the Digital Decade program will require significant additional investment, and most of that investment will be provided by a complex array of for-profit enterprises funded by private investment capital....

Unlike bus and rail operators, the nature of telecommunication service meant that small players in the market cannot start small. Specifically, a 4G telecommunication line for voice call and short message service must work everywhere in the defined geographical locale. This means that whatever...

This paper investigates the impacts of the current roaming rules on domestic competition and welfare. We consider a model for two countries in which each country has two operators that compete in the retail market for access services and also in the wholesale market for roaming. We first derive...

This paper analyses interconnection in telecommunications markets in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region, focusing on cross-border roaming as well as international interconnection. These issues have been identified as critical for cross-border integration and regulatory...

We empirically assess the impact of the EU roaming regulation on mobile operators' average revenues per user (ARPU) and retail prices. Using a differences-in-difference approach, hedonic price regressions and detailed operator and plan-level data we find that the regulation decreased mobile...

Limited competition hinders the optimal use of telecommunication services in the Dominican Republic, which lags peer countries in mobile subscriptions and internet penetration. Despite recent reforms designed to enhance competition, the telecommunications sector remains dominated by a small...

The roam-like-at-home regulation (RLAH) eliminated all mobile roaming surcharges to Eu-ropean consumers travelling within the European Economic Area (EEA). We measure the causal impact of the regulation on EEA roaming traffic, using the Rest of the World as a control group. We find large and...

This article examines the formation of the first internet exchange point (IXP) in Mexico amid the implementation of telecommunication reforms and asymmetric regulations in a market with low level of competition. An IXP is defined as a shared interconnection facility and a key internet governance...

This paper studies the effects of infrastructure sharing agreements on telecommunications markets. Using an oligopoly model with an investment stage where firms compete " à la Cournot", I find that provided no firm is excluded, infrastructure sharing agreements decrease prices, increase...

Our paper seeks to define the term effective competition as used in Mexico’s telecommunications sector and implemented through two main regulatory tools: the determination of preponderance and the subsequent imposition of asymmetric measures. To lift, modify or deepen these measures, we argue,...

lobbying (internal organization vs. trade association) by firms in administrative agencies. It explores the power and limitations of the collective action theories and transaction cost theories in explaining lobbying. It introduces a dataset of over 900 lobbying contacts cover 101 issues at the...

This paper addresses the impact on investment incentives of the network sharing arrangements mandated by the Telecommunications Act of 1996, with a focus on the implications of irreversible investment. Although the goal is to promote competition, the sharing rules now in place reduce incentives...

Telecommunications regulation in the U.S. is replete with a system of subsidies and taxes. Because of budgetary spending limits, Congress is unable to increase general taxes to pay for social programs and thus funds these programs from taxes on specific sectors of the economy. In this paper I...

Regulators have long been aware of the social aspects of communication. In the past, regulated monopolists have provided Universal Service Obligations, typically funded via a system of cross-subsidies. In this paper, we first review the rationale for imposing Universal Service Obligations, based...

Launching and stimulating competition in telecommunications markets is an important policy goal. It contains two elements: to encourage entry and to make competition effective such that consumers benefit. The first one requires that entrants can make profits after investing in infrastructure so...

This paper presents a basic framework to assess whether structural (vertical) separation is desirable. It is discussed within the setting of fixed telecommunications markets. From an economist's perspective, the key question that underlies the case for structural separation is: is there a...

It has traditionally been argued that the development of telecommunications infrastructure is dependent on the quality of countries' political institutions. We estimate the effect of political institutions on the diffusion of three telecommunications services and find it to be much smaller in...

There is an important but underappreciated tension between transmission-layer services and application-layer services in the design of prior telecommunications statutes. These statutes were designed for a different technological era, one where discrete networks served distinct purposes—e.g.,...

The paper aims at empirically investigating the relationship between regulation and the capital structure of the regulated firm, A key aspect of the referred relationship pertains a leverage effect according to which debt could be increased as a response to previous physical capital investment...

The evolution of EU administrative law generates peculiar governance processes in the entire EU policy space, EU Economic Law being a prime example. By comparatively examining the interactions of the key national and supranational institutions enforcing EU competition law and telecommunications...

U.S. network industry reforms led other countries in the past, but have recently run into difficulties in specific areas. In particular, the U.S. telecommunications sector was hit by a deep crisis and electricity reforms suffered under the California disaster. Part of the explanation for these...

Regulators act as “market referees”, balancing often competing interests of stakeholders, including governments, current and future actors in the markets, and consumers. At the same time, markets are changing at an unprecedented pace due to new technologies, the international drive toward...

This paper reviews comparative approaches to key issues in economic regulation in four countries of the Southern African Development Community, and how this has been reflected in outcomes in terms of competition, prices, access, and innovation in telecommunications services. In this paper,...

The article is dedicated to the analysis of cost factors, primarily tax burden, that can explain the observable price difference on Russian market between domestic telecommunication equipment and imports from China and USA. The relevance of the research is justified by critical significance of...

One of the first international cases of telecoms regulation that mandate incumbent firms to share their economies of scope and their network economies with competitors was the one that took place in the United States, through the so-called “Telecomm Act” (1996) and its corresponding...

From enjoying natural monopolies to witnessing tough competition for services, the telecom sector in India has come a long way. It is now characterized by one of the fastest-growing sectors of deploying the latest technology and driving the economic growth in India. With the rapid intervention...

While the importance of both broadband itself and its speed increases in a whole society, the high cost of providing broadband as universal service at high speed still raises a question of whether to introduce the USO. Therefore, the introduction of broadband universal service at 100Mbps since...

The literature on the effects of investment in broadband infrastructure finds positive macroeconomic effects. However, it is severely constrained because it could hitherto only analyse investment or adoption up to basic broadband, but not up to the newer generations of hybrid fibre and...

The FCC has billed 3.5 GHz as the “innovation band,” with the idea that “regulatory adaptability should make the 3.5 GHz band hospitable to a wide variety of users, deployment models, and business cases, including some solutions to market needs not adequately served by our conventional...

Objective - The global industry is transforming into a digital world, evidenced by digital transformation performed by almost all of the industry sectors. One of the digital drivers is the support of connectivity provided by the telecommunication industry. The increasing mobile subscribers,...