Telecommunications Policy

This article examines the roles and consequences of different approaches to 5G market design for innovation. The analysis is grounded in a conceptual framework that explicitly considers the complementarities among networks, applications, and services. Good policy arrangements align the legal and regulatory framework with the technical and economic characteristics of the sector and the broader, social visions for new technologies.

Due to rapid technological changes, governments in developing countries have paid special attention to sustainability. However, understanding insights into the sustainability of telecentres remains an open question (Editor's note: telecentres are public places where people can access computers, the Internet, and other digital technologies). This paper aims to fill this gap. We conducted a case study analyzing the sustainability of telecentres in Vietnam.

Efforts to close the rural/urban digital divide in Canada have reached new heights in the wake of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and “stay-at-home” policies. Yet the extent to which the rural/urban digital divide extends to pricing and demand for broadband services is not well understood. Using a dataset of more than 4700 residential survey responses from southern Ontario, Canada, we assess the disparity in pricing and willingness to pay for broadband across rural and urban households.

The radio spectrum that governments license to mobile operators is central to the development of mobile broadband services. However, there is significant variation around how much and when spectrum is assigned, as well as its costs. We assessed whether policies to assign spectrum had an impact on consumer welfare in 64 countries during the 2010–2017 period and found evidence that policies that reduce the amount of spectrum available to operators, delay the assignment of spectrum and increase the cost of spectrum all impacted two important consumer outcomes - network coverage and quality.