Telecommunications Policy

We use a county-level panel dataset from 2012 to 2018 to assess the impacts of various state policies on total and rural broadband availability in the US. The primary dependent variable is the percentage of residents with access to 25 Megabits per second (Mbps) download and 3 Mbps upload speeds via a fixed connection, with alternative specifications considering other aspects of availability such as technology type and competition. We control for the main determinants of Internet availability such as income, education, age, and population density.

This paper finds that policy mixes for mobile broadband diffusion need to be differentiated depending on where a country is situated in three stages of mobile broadband diffusion because as a mobile broadband market grows, demand constraints hindering subscription of mobile broadband will also change. A total of 115 countries are clustered into three groups (Take-off, Fast-Diffusion, and Saturated), categorized by their diffusion rates and diffusion speeds over four years from 2013 to 2016.

We evaluate a program by a private Internet Service Provider intended to encourage low-income households to subscribe to broadband internet service.

This paper tracks increasingly aggressive initiatives by the United States government to reallocate spectrum on an expedited and unilateral basis well before conclusion of inter-governmental coordination. Rather than embrace the customary commitment to achieve consensus on global spectrum allocations at the International Telecommunication Union (“ITU”), the Federal Communications Commission (“FCC”) has auctioned off large blocks of frequencies for the next generation (“5G”) of wireless services.

The upgrade of legacy infrastructure is a challenging undertaking in general. The underlying issues are especially prominent for telecommunications networks outside of urban areas. Using German micro-level data, we identify the structural determinants for fiber optics deployment and its extent. We also measure the role of technology competition from the existing infrastructures, VDSL-Vectoring and TV-Cable.

The reduction of the digital divide due to the availability of the Internet and the improvement of skills is accompanied by reverse and resistance trends associated with the influence of socio-demographic and economic characteristics of users. In this paper, we estimate the volume and dynamics of the digital divide in access and use of the Internet in Russia by key social groups according to a longitudinal survey for 2008–2018. We found that along with the reducing of the digital divide, its gaps still remain.