The Economics of Telecommunication Services

Introduction.- Characteristics and Characterization of Information Networks.- Drivers of the Telecommunication Industry.- Graph Theoretic Characterization of Communication Networks.- Small World and Scale-free Networks.- Characterization of Telecommunication Traffic.- Bandwidth and Throughput of Networks: Circuit Switched Networks.- Bandwidth and Throughput of Networks: Packet Switched Networks.- Pricing of Telecommunication Services.- Pricing of Circuit Switched Services.- Pricing of Packet Switched Services.- Regulation.- Net Neutrality.- Game Theory and its Application to Communication Networks.- Multi-service Network Models.- Subsidy-free prices in Class-based Networks.- Market-clearing prices in Class-based Networks.- A Constant Revenue Model for Net Neutrality.- A Constant Revenue Model for Packet Switched Networks.- A Two-step Quality of Service Provisioning in Multi-class Networks.- Network of the Future.- Conclusion.

Pramode Verma is Professor Emeritus of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Gallogly College of Engineering of the University of Oklahoma. Prior to that (1999-2016) he was Professor, Williams Chair in Telecommunications Networking, and Director of the Telecommunications Engineering Program. Before joining the University of Oklahoma, over a period of twenty-five years, he held a variety of professional, managerial and leadership positions in the telecommunications industry, most notably at AT&T Bell Laboratories and Lucent Technologies. He has authored/co-authored several books and over 150 journal articles and conference papers and is the co-inventor of eleven patents. He has been a keynote speaker at several international conferences and conducted several workshops.

Pramode holds a bachelor's degree in physics from Patna University, a bachelor's degree in engineering from the Indian Institute of Science and a doctorate in engineering from Concordia University. Healso holds an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Fan Zhang is Engineering Director at Two-bit Beijing Technical Company in China. Prior to joining Two-bit, she worked at Oracle, Amazon, and Cyngn (a start-up company) in Seattle, WA.  Her research interests includes pricing in networks and scalable fault-tolerant distributed systems. Her research has appeared in Netnomics, IET Communications, and presented at several international conferences. Fan obtained her doctorate in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Oklahoma, a bachelor's degree in Management Information System from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications (BUPT) and a master's degree in Telecommunications from BUPT.