Essays on competition between fixed and mobile networks in the broadband industry and on scientific publications issued by innovative companies

Lauriane Dewulf

ULB Institutional Repository from ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles

Abstract: Abstact 1 - Over the past few years, mobile broadband technologies and speeds have greatly increased in the European Union, reaching an ever larger share of broadband consumers. These changes have implications for broadband market competition. In the past, mobile services offered slow but mobile internet whereas fixed services offered faster but fixed internet. Fixed and mobile broad-band were therefore obviously complementary services. While mobile broadband speeds have significantly increased over the latest years, fixed broadband is remaining rather a fixed technol-ogy. Consequently, if mobile broadband becomes fast enough considering some consumers’ needs, we believe that the same consumers will choose to use only the mobile broadband tech-nology (who by itself offers high-speed and mobility) instead of both fixed and mobile broad-band technologies. As a result, we may observe an increasing trend towards fixed to mobile substitution. Our study investigates empirically this trend. More specifically, it analyzes the im-pact of mobile broadband technology evolution - through 4G adoption - on fixed to mobile sub-stitution in the 28 European countries from 2009 until 2015. The few studies examining this sub-ject show that fixed to mobile substitution exists although none of these studies analyze the evo-lution of this substitution. The results confirm a significant existence of a fixed to mobile substi-tution in the EU, and show that this substitution is more than doubled when a country adopts 4G. The growing competitive pressure from mobile operators also provides fixed operators with incentives to acquire – or merge with – mobile operators. This fact should be a concern for policy makers as it could have harmful consequences for competition and investment on the broad-band market.

Keywords: telecommunications; competition; innovation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-05-22
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pay
Note: Degree: Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion
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