Effects of capacity sharing on mobile access competition

The growth of mobile Internet usage is raising concerns about the sufficiency of capacity in networks. Therefore, several technical solutions are currently being developed and standardized to increase the efficiency in the radio access and on the entire end-to-end Internet path. If successfully deployed, these technologies will have a significant impact on the Internet connectivity market, especially the mobile access competition. The objective of this paper is to shed light on the different evolution paths of the mobile access market which developments in technical, economic and regulatory domains could induce in the future. This paper envisions operator and end-user centric competition scenarios and compares them against the current vertical competition between mobile network operators (MNOs). The analysis shows that the degree of competition in the mobile access in the future is highly dependent on the level of transaction and switching costs. The end user scenario with related multipath protocol deployments intensifies the competition more than the operator scenario enabled by software-based dynamic spectrum management.