Supply-side measures for policy makers to promote mobile broadband coverage

George Houpis, Goran Serdarevic and Jonas Vetterle

27th European Regional ITS Conference, Cambridge (UK) 2016 from International Telecommunications Society (ITS)

Abstract: Governments around the world recognise widespread broadband access as a facilitator of economic growth. As a result we observe that many countries have introduced National Broadband Policies which set ambitious targets for broadband coverage. Fixed network may not be commercially viable in more remote rural areas because the cost of roll out is too high. Therefore mobile networks are likely to play an important role in achieving these national targets. In particular, for rural and remote areas of a country where fixed networks are not viable, mobile will likely be the primary form of broadband access. Whilst Governments are interested in maintaining competitive markets there may be some rural areas of a country that are so uneconomic that even mobile network competition may not achieve coverage, either within the required timeframe or at all. It may, however, be desirable for such areas to be covered because of the wider economic benefits of widespread broadband availability. This paper presents and evaluates different forms of supply-side intervention that can be used to achieve mobile broadband coverage in rural areas.

Keywords: Competition Policy; Network Economics; Telecommunications Policy; Economics of Regulation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pay and nep-reg
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/148674/1/Houpis-Serdarevic-Vetterle.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:zbw:itse16:148674

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 27th European Regional ITS Conference, Cambridge (UK) 2016 from International Telecommunications Society (ITS)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().