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The telecommunications sector has become a dynamic key area for the economic development of the European Union (EU) and remains in constant evolution. Because of intense competition, telecommunications companies are forced to diversify their offers and thus to propose an increasing number of services. However, economic analysis often ignores important technical aspects of telecommunications and may not be aware of new developments. On the other hand, engineering models often ignore economic factors. Thus, the design and deployment of future networks that incorporate new services are subject to uncertainties such as equipment and capacity prices (due to technological innovation), and demand and supply for services (due to competition). Questions surrounding the deployment of telecommunications infrastructure and next generation networks – together with the massive adoption and increasing demand for new services – bring to the forefront hard questions about the future of Telecommunications and the need to address those questions in a multidisciplinary manner. This book on “Telecommunication Economics” fills that gap, presenting the multidisciplinary outcomes of COST Action “Econ@Tel: A Telecommunications Economics COST Network”.

The arena of telecommunications, Internet-empowered interaction, and mobile network technology keeps expanding to encapsulate an ever widening galaxy of customized and utility communication services, that is, specialized applications and the web at large. New challenges are on the horizon as the web makes the transition from the wired Internet to a new model based on ubiquitous access underpinned by a vast array of mobile terminals and the cloud infrastructure. The persistently drastic phenomenon of economic and technical change is transforming economic and social life as well as adding to the pressure on the existing regulatory frameworks.

After more than a decade of development work and hopes, the usage of mobile Internet has finally taken off. Now, we are witnessing the first signs of evidence what might become the explosion of mobile content and applications that will be shaping the (mobile) Internet of the future. Similar to the wired Internet, search will become very relevant for the usage of mobile Internet. Within the mobile ecosystem framework, this section will discuss if and how intense public action in the mobile search domain should (could) be. Potential actions refer both to ‘conventional’ and ’non-conventional’ regulatory approaches. Public administrations as procurement bodies may leverage services and thus acting as early deployers of applications is an example of a ‘conventional’ case, while the use of the wealth of public data with high added value in mobile search scenarios would be one of a ‘non-conventional’ case. The section will present a list of different policy options and analyze their feasibility. These include policy options aimed both at the demand side (user-oriented) and at the supply side (such as innovation-support policies, regulatory policies, industrial-type policies) of mobile search.

This section discusses the need for regulation of international roaming charges. This is done through analysis of the EU experiences by a heavy handed price regulation of roaming services.

This section shows technology changes in mobile communications field, like adaptive spectrum usage, 4G mobile services, new M-applications. A theoretic model is shown about the joining process of the value chain, and conflicts are shown on vertical integration in both directions. The staged rises of the mobile communications’ level lead two main types of regulator activities. As a consequence in the near future there are some steps by the regulatory agency to be done.

Innovation and economic transformation are difficult phenomena to measure, especially in high-tech fast changing sectors. Dynamic competition is a key driving force behind growth and a complex, multidimensional nature calls for an integrated approach. Recently a research agenda that see trademark as a valuable addition to the economic indicators arsenal has been gaining momentum. This section makes the case for employing trademarks as an indicator for assessing dynamic competition and international competitiveness in the telecommunications equipment and services sector. It considers community trademark data to explore stylized facts and recent trends in the European market, a sophisticated and contested world sales pitch on which this data can be employed to generate substantive academic insights as well as useful knowledge for policy-makers at the EU and national levels.

This chapter delves into the far reaching socio-economic drivers and constraints of telecommunications and communications media, and hinges on a diversity of policies not just about technical access to them and pricing, but more importantly about the social and freedom-of-expression rights. After all, communications systems and services are there to serve people’s interactions. Therefore this chapter presents four different aspects of telecommunications, dealing with topics largely ignored in the past and in telecommunications and media, i.e. social implications and policy aspects of broadcast media.

This section summarizes the data and information collected across Europe and beyond, inside the COST 605 Action (2008-2011), and can be relevant for separate analysis, research and regulations about the mobile communications costs of poor and needy groups. Miscellaneous social and macro-economic data on the needy and their mobile communications usage in five European countries are presented. It also contains the specification of a new indicator whereby the affordability of mobile communications for poor and needy can be established, and the corresponding results for 7 countries in 2006 and 2010. The indicator is the “poor’s purchasing power parity (PPP) in wireless minutes per month”, based on reported data collected on the distribution amongst poor and needy groups in Georgia and France. An Appendix gives some data sources for the countries where data were collected.

Despite several successful pilot studies, a general implementation and adoption of mobile health services is not often the case. The deployment of eHealth and in particular mHealth services is discussed for three non similar European countries: Cyprus, Georgia, and Belgium. Each country uses the same kind of mobile health services with a different emphasis. By comparing results of a reference case, tele-monitoring heart patients, major implications are identified for a general rollout of services and respective recommendations.

More and more organizations are adapting the solution of e-teams - teams that can span distances and times to take on challenges that most local and global organizations must address. This experimental study examined leadership in the context of traditional teams using face-to-face communication and virtual teams using computer-mediated communication. The research question is which leadership functions are necessary to promote virtual team performance. A model, suggesting that leader communication behaviors mediate the relationship between “virtuality” and “team’s outputs” will be presented, and a methodology to examine this model will be illustrated. The findings show that face-to-face team’s output is partially superior to a virtual team’s output, and that social communication behaviors of face-to-face leaders are positive than social communication behaviors of virtual leaders. Virtual team is a common way of working, and will expand in the future. Thus, the importance of the theoretical and practical implementation of the virtual leadership will be discussed.