Universal service: beyond established practice to possibility space

Krishna P. Jayakar and Harmeet Sawhney

Telecommunications Policy, vol. 28, issue 3-4, 339-357

Abstract: A number of proposals have been put forward to reform universal service and make it compatible with the new competitive telecommunications environment in the United States. The diversity and apparent contradictions between these proposals makes the public policy dialog scattered and confused. This paper introduces the idea of a 'possibility space' delineated by two dimensions--'intervention' and 'locus'--that lays out the contours of the emerging intellectual landscape by placing past practices as well as present proposals on the same conceptual plane. It suggests that the current approach to universal service reforms continues to be bound by the self-imposed limitations of a past regulatory era, and that a heterogeneous universal service policy is likely to be more suited to the new telecommunications environment.

Keywords: Universal; access; Digital; divide; Information; poor (search for similar items in EconPapers)
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308596104000059
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
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:eee:telpol:v:28:y::i:3-4:p:339-357

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/30471/bibliographic
http://www.elsevier. ... /30471/bibliographic

Access Statistics for this article

Telecommunications Policy is currently edited by Erik Bohlin

More articles in Telecommunications Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().