The role of telecommunications in economic development

Annals of Telecommunications - Les télécommunications ont connu un développement soutenu depuis plus de vingt ans. La diffusion des services a toujours été sensible à...     

A functional analysis of the network: A prerequisite for deregulating the telecommunications industry

Due to the obvious inefficiency of regulatory authorities, the introduction of potential competition in the markets of natural monopolies has recently been emphasized in theoretical publications. In spite of its limitations the framework of contestable markets has been the analytical background of decisions in various industries. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the application of these theories to the telecommunications network as a whole. Econometric models have failed to establish that the telecommunications cost function is subadditive, mainly because networks are heterogeneous from an economic point of view: information is transmitted with increasing returns to scale, while there are growing economies of scope between the data processing industry and the handling, by digital switching equipment, of the calls’ content and of the signalling and addressing information. To allow for this current technical evolution the deregulation process should dissociate the transmission network, which is a natural monopoly, and the traffic routing networks, which could be gradually opened to a limited competition. In this new structure there would be a wholesale market in which a regulated monopoly would rent transmission facilities (leased circuits, dedicated access loops, …) and a competitive retail market in which operators would sell traffic and value added networks to residence and business customers.     

l’analyse du fonctionnement interactif à l’évaluation du marché des téléconférences

The authors are concerned with the comparative analysis of interactive processes in a meeting, subject to various situations of mediation. The research is based on the analysis of records of actual meetings, either in face to face situations, or in audio or video-conferences. Interactivity is first defined as the ability to interrupt in order to help the communication process. The mechanisms which regulate this interactivity are then analyzed, as well as its functions in the way exchanges proceed and speech is built. The thesis is put forward that parallel to the exchange of informations linked to the contents of the meeting, an exchange of control signals, chiefly of an infra and non verbal kind, takes place as on a signalling channel, the role of which is to regulate: the allocation of speech turn-taking, the mutual understanding of participants, the setting out of the speech issued on the main channel, the construction of the common knowledge useful to the achievement of the task, the regulation of speech status, the production of ambiguous and unopposable speeches… The study enables identification of the disturbances brought to the regulation of interactivity when the technical conditions of mediation do change, and allows improvement of the designing of the protocoles aimed at selecting voice and image data before their transmission through teleconferencing systems.     

The Impact of a Radical Innovation on Business Models: Incremental Adjustments or Big Bang?

In this paper we study the impact of a radical technological innovation on business models. Do firms react by adjusting their business models incrementally, through iterative steps? Or do such innovations lead, instead, to a big bang of new innovative business models that are all adopted and experimented with by the industry? To answer these questions, we analyze the impact of digitization—a radical innovation—on business models in the recorded music industry. Using an economic analysis of the effects of digitization, we begin by building five potential digital business models for the music industry. Then, using data from a survey on a sample of French record companies, we map these record labels on our digital business models. Our analysis suggests that digitization has led to a big bang of business models in the music industry, rather than to incremental adjustments of the existing business model.