Abstract
This chapter provides a very basic and general introduction to telecommunications, more precisely telephony networks and the internet. It is completely nontechnical in all aspects: No formal economics appear and neither do technical specifications or standards from the world of telecommunications.
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Notes
- 1.
Among them, e.g., fax, data transmission via modem, and video telephony.
- 2.
“Bandwidth” measures the amount of data that can be transmitted in a certain interval of time.
- 3.
This has changed with the rise of the internet and its bandwidth-hungry applications. Nowadays coax or even optical fibre connections up to the CPE are not uncommon in some areas.
- 4.
This difference can be computed according to \(\frac{n(n-1)} {2} - n\) for n ≥ 2 and monotonically increasing with additional subscribers.
- 5.
“Loop” is to be understood in the engineering context, i.e. that a pair of wires is needed in order to create an electrical circuit.
- 6.
The classic setup in North America has five levels, or classes, of hierarchy: The lowest, class five, is the end office, followed by the toll center, a primary, and then a sectional center. At the top, we have a class one regional center. This traditionally served as rough orientation for the industry worldwide, but as the common network architecture for the United States and Canada covers a geographical area unique in size, other countries’ networks have less levels. Germany’s telephone network, for example, has an architecture with three such classes.
- 7.
Technical details on the internet protocol, its latest standards and the services realized on its basis (so far), can be found in Badach and Hoffmann (2007).
- 8.
For example the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, commonly abbreviated to HTTP, the File Transfer Protocol (FTP), the Post Office Protocol (POP), or the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), to name but the ones most known.
- 9.
This acronym stands for Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.
- 10.
Downstream meaning traffic from a network in a lower layer according to the above definition.
- 11.
Where size can mean a number of things, beginning with traffic exchanged to number and type of customers or geographical area covered.
- 12.
Towards a Dynamic European Economy: Green Paper on the Development of the Common Market for Telecommunications Services and Equipment, COM(87)290final (30 June 1987)
- 13.
As a matter of fact, the exact definition of voice telephony in the 1987 Green Paper already contained various loopholes through which certain voice services, e.g. calling or credit card services, as well as calls from or to mobile networks were possible. In contrast, competitive service providers could not offer services that required them to assign phone numbers to private customers.
- 14.
Review of The situation in the Telecommunications Services Sector, SEC(92)1048final (21 October 1992)
- 15.
Green Paper on the Liberalisation of Telecommunications Infrastructure and Cable Television Networks of 1994: Part I – Principle and Timetable, COM(94)440final (25 October 1994), and Part II – A Common Approach to the Provision of Infrastructure for Telecommunications in the European Union, COM(94)682final (25 January 1995)
- 16.
This action consisted mainly of the “Consultation on the Green Paper on the Liberalization of Telecommunications Infrastructure and Cable Television Networks”, COM(95)158final (3 May 1995), the “Resolution of 18 September 1995 on the Implementation of the Future Regulatory Framework for Telecommunications” [1995] OJ C 258/1, and the Directive 96/19, Full Competition Directive.
- 17.
According to the ITU-T E.164 recommendation, which contains the international public telecommunications numbering plan.
- 18.
By this we exclude services such as Skype, or GoogleTalk, which are merely internet-based software applications.
- 19.
For the following analysis we can also include firms in the first category that own a network, but only on a local or regional level.
- 20.
These are typically not firms that offer solely VoIP services, but for example cable providers or utilities that operate enhanced, IP-capable networks.
- 21.
These uniform termination fees are mandated by the national regulator.
- 22.
This acronym is derived from the expression E.164 NUmber Mapping, which is the generic term for mapping standard telephone numbers to IP-addresses.
- 23.
The Information and Communication Technologies Regulation Toolkit has been developed and is maintained by a cooperation of the International Telecommunication Union and the World Bank.
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Servatius, P. (2012). Telecommunications and the Internet. In: Network Economics and the Allocation of Savings. Lecture Notes in Economics and Mathematical Systems, vol 653. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21096-9_4
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