THE IMPACT OF NETWORK SHARING ON COMPETITION: THE CHALLENGES POSED BY EARLY VERSUS MATURE 5G

Zoltán Pápai (), Aliz McLean (), Péter Nagy (), Gábor Szabó () and Gergely Csorba ()
Additional contact information
Zoltán Pápai: Infrapont Economic Consulting
Aliz McLean: Infrapont Economic Consulting
Péter Nagy: Infrapont Economic Consulting
Gábor Szabó: Infrapont Economic Consulting

No 2033, CERS-IE WORKING PAPERS from Institute of Economics, Centre for Economic and Regional Studies

Abstract: The rollout of fifth generation mobile networks is progressing around the world, but 5G looks especially expensive compared to previous generations. Network sharing between two or more mobile operators is an obvious way to attain significant cost savings, but may also raise competition concerns. This paper first distinguishes between early and mature 5G, and then discusses the expected changes mature 5G brings to the assessment of active mobile network sharing agreements from a competition policy point of view. We focus on the three main concerns where 5G may bring the most significant changes in the evaluation compared to 4G: service differentiation, cost commonality between the parties and the parties’ ability and incentives to grant access to critical inputs to downstream competitors. For each of these concerns, we show that they are not easy to substantiate and in some cases the concerns may even become less grave than under 4G.

Keywords: mobile telecommunication markets; network sharing; competition policy; competitive assessment; 5G (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: K21 L13 L41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32 pages
Date: 2020-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-law and nep-reg
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mtakti.hu/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/CERSIEWP202033.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The impact of network sharing on competition: the challenges posed by early versus mature 5G (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:has:discpr:2033

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CERS-IE WORKING PAPERS from Institute of Economics, Centre for Economic and Regional Studies Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Nora Horvath ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).