Competition and cooperation in wireless multi-access networks

Abstract

Providing affordable wireless access for all user-needs is one of the remaining great challenges for the telecommunications industry. It has over the years become evident that neither a single wireless access technology nor a single business actor is capable of solving this problem alone. The appearance of multimode terminals, however, opens up for new, more flexible architectures where adaptation to emerging user-needs can be done in a faster, and more cost efficient way than by replacing the entire infrastructure. In addition to these technical advantages, multimode terminals have several rather far-reaching business implications. The fact that operators no longer need to provide full coverage with their preferred wireless access technology is probably the key factor. It means that infrastructure can be incrementally deployed (where needed) and shared in other locations, resulting in large cost reductions, as well as lowered entry barriers for new specialized actors focusing on a niche market, e.g., indoor coverage. To exploit these potential advantages to the full extent, however, new technology that enables a user and network, or alternatively networks, to form a dynamic relation on the fly has to be developed. In this chapter we examine how infrastructure sharing can be performed by means of such new technology and what consequences it may have on retail prices. We start by studying the archetypical cases of pure cooperation and competition and both are shown to be feasible from a technical as well as business standpoint. Furthermore they are shown to result in cost reductions, and in the competitive scenario these may also transfer to lowered end-user price. Although the cases provide valuable insight into the mechanisms of cost reduction and retail pricing, they are note realistic as such and our observation is that future business models may neither be categorized as competitive nor cooperative. Two emerging examples are implicit access cooperation (coopetition) and free access concepts. The chapter is concluded by a discussion concerning some implications of these scenarios and an outline of some new related research topics are presented. © 2007 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.