The price of broadband quality: tracking the changing valuation of service characteristics

Bryan Coyne () and Sean Lyons

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: This paper investigates how retail broadband prices, choice and quality are changing over time. Using a dataset containing daily observations of plans offered in Ireland from 2007 to 2013, this paper applies hedonic modelling techniques to observe the changing pricing of service characteristics. We augment our results by restricting the analysis to large operators and also by weighting by operator market share for a subset of our data (2010-2013). Although we find that average nominal prices remain static throughout our sample period, quality of service has risen dramatically over time, particularly with respect to download speed. Some characteristics of broadband plans exhibit broadly stable valuations over time, but the elasticity of price with respect to advertised download speed and the premium on bundled plans declined during the sample period. In addition, the retail price premium enjoyed by the incumbent operator fell significantly since 2007.

Keywords: broadband services; market analysis; Ireland (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L11 L96 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-07-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ict and nep-reg
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/65375/1/MPRA_paper_65375.pdf original version (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:pra:mprapa:65375

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().