EXPLAINING THE DEFINITION OF WHOLESALE ACCESS PRICES IN THE PORTUGUESE TELECOMMUNICATIONS INDUSTRY

Abstract

The 2016–2018 triennium was a period marked by a fierce dispute between the European Commission and Autoridade Nacional de Comunica¸c˜oes, Portugal, on the need to regulate wholesale access prices. While the European Commission defended the imposition of Fiber-To-The-x regulation in non-competitive areas, the Portuguese sectoral regulator argued in favor of the persistence of Fiber-To-The-x deregulation. Following a Game Theory approach, the present study demonstrates that the transition from Fiber-To-Thex deregulation to Fiber-To-The-x regulation should only occur when a given territorial unit becomes a competitive area since the subgame perfect Nash equilibrium captures a regulatory framework optimally characterized by the imposition of active access price deregulation (regulation) in non-competitive (competitive) areas, that is, local administrative units characterized by a weak (strong) degree of vertical spillover, respectively. Meanwhile, ducts access regulation must be permanently imposed throughout the national territory, despite it can be relaxed in competitive areas if the regulator imposes intra-flexibility to establish a monopolistic bottleneck to ensure social welfare maximization. Previous conclusions require to introduce both facility-based and service-based competition at the entry stage as well as active and passive obligations at the regulation stage in a multi-stage game with complete information. The present analysis legitimizes the emergence of a new optimization theory in the telecommunications literature, whose modus operandi is contrary to (coincident with) the ladder of investment theory in non-competitive (competitive)