The Unbundling of Network Elements: Japan's Experience

Nobuo Ikeda

Discussion papers from Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI)

Abstract: With the advent of the Internet, the emphasis of communication policies has moved from the regulation of telephone networks to the unbundling regulation to enforce sharing of network elements. Since unbundling is often impeded by the renegotiation by incumbents over the control of essential facilities, it would be advisable to separate the company that owns local loop (LoopCo). Recently the number of subscribers of DSL in Japan has grown phenomenally due to the unbundling regulation. This suggests that unbundling can accelerate the proliferation of broadband, but this lesson cannot be easily generalized to other countries, because the success depends on the special conditions such as extremely low pricing of entrants and strategic mistakes of NTT that neglected DSL. If the unbundling regulation succeeds in increasing competition, the telecommunications industry in the narrow sense will shrink, making the universal services of telephone network increasingly difficult.

Pages: 18 pages
Date: 2003-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-net and nep-sea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.rieti.go.jp/jp/publications/dp/03e023.pdf (application/pdf)

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:eti:dpaper:03023

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion papers from Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by TANIMOTO, Toko ().