Telecommunications Policy

We evaluate the impact of mobile operator mergers on the unit price of data and voice by using country-level observations on retail revenue for data, cellular data traffic, retail revenue for voice, and outgoing voice minutes. Using a difference-in-differences estimation strategy, we estimate the effect of operator merger by comparing the difference between the non-merging countries and the merging countries before and after the introduction of the operator merger.

Sufficient access to and utilization of broadband is an ongoing concern for rural economic development. Using a rural region in Northern New York, we consider the investment and operational costs of a broadband cooperative and determine service prices for which it is financially viable. Service prices need to increase 75%–131%, depending on grant restrictions, relative to existing market prices for a new broadband cooperative to become financially feasible.

Exploring the use of an innovative approach to a public-private partnership (PPP) to spur the deployment of broadband and create more resilient telecommunications networks in Puerto Rico. Such a partnership is a critical ingredient of the plan for rebuilding the telecommunications sector of Puerto Rico after the island was devastated by Hurricanes Irma and Maria in September 2017. The proposed partnership also has the potential for enabling the expansion of citizen access to broadband services throughout Puerto Rico.

As of the end of 2019, 46.4% of the world's population does not have regular access to the Internet. Bringing the more than 3.5 billion individuals still unconnected online is the primary goal for multiple international organizations, including the ITU and the UN Broadband Commission. Two important barriers that restrict connectivity are the lack of infrastructure and affordability.

Digital gaps have the potential to exacerbate the inequalities that exist in society. The main objective of this paper is to study the gaps that occur in the use of internet services by households in Spain during the period 2007–2019 and to become useful in the design of policies addressed to narrow specific digital divides. The data is a panel obtained from the ICT-H Survey on Households of the National Statistics Institute. This paper defines the gaps as the differences in the use of internet services across individual consumers.