Would David be More Likely to Speak to Angela under National Roaming?
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Adriano Basso
Abstract
The UK Government has proposed national roaming to ensure that consumers may use rival networks in areas where their own operator does not offer (network) coverage (these are known as partial not-spots). The proposed policy aimed at increasing the likelihood of callers being able to make and receive calls. While this may raise a number of concerns in terms of possible harm to consumers, this article only focuses on one question: whether national roaming, rather than making it more likely that consumers in partial not-spots may be able make and receive calls, may achieve the very opposite outcome. This is because, under national roaming, and depending on the level of the charge, operators may have the incentive to withdraw their network coverage and roam instead. We also analyse the implications for dual coverage areas.
Acknowledgments
We thank Carlo Cambini, Steffen Hoernig, participants to the FSR C&M and CMPF Annual Scientific Seminar on Competition and Regulation in Infrastructure and Digital Markets (18–19 March 2016) and Martin Cave and Marc Bourreau for very helpful comments and Tommaso Valletti for his encouragement. We are also grateful to two anonymous referees whose comments helped us to greatly improve the clarity of this article. Both authors worked for Ofcom on national roaming issues in the early part of 2013. However, the views and opinions expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of Ofcom or their current employers. This article is solely based on publicly available information.
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©2016 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- Would David be More Likely to Speak to Angela under National Roaming?
- Second-Degree Price Discrimination on Two-Sided Markets
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- Would David be More Likely to Speak to Angela under National Roaming?
- Second-Degree Price Discrimination on Two-Sided Markets
