This edited book serves as a companion volume to the Seventh INFORMS Telecommunications Conference held in Boca Raton, Florida, March 7-10, 2004. The 18 papers in this book were carefully selected after a thorough re view process. The research presented within these articles focuses on the latest methodological developments in three key areas—pricing of telecommunica tions services, network design, and resource allocation—that are most relevant to current telecommunications planning. With the global deregulation of the telecommunications industry, effective pricing and revenue management, as well as an understanding of competi tive pressures are key factors that will improve revenue in telecommunica tions companies. Chapters 1-5 address these topics by focusing on pricing of telecommunications services. They present some novel ideas related to pricing (including auction-based pricing of network bandwidth) and modeling compe tition in the industry. The successful telecommunications companies of the future will likely be the ones that can minimize their costs while meeting customer expectations. In this context the optimal design/provisioning of telecommunication networks plays an important role. Chapters 6-12 address these topics by focusing on net work design for a wide range of technologies including SONET, SDH, WDM, and MPLS. They include the latest research developments related to the mod eling and solving of network design problems. Day-to-day management/control of telecommunications networks is depen dent upon the optimal allocation of resources. Chapters 13-18 provide insight ful solutions to several intriguing resource allocation problems.

Systematically reviews recent innovations in the economic theory of pricing and extends results to the conditions which characterize telecommunications markets

Busy decision-makers need the specifics quickly, without plowing through details that do not affect the economics of a project. Telecommunications Cost Management presents the key facts up front, with sample calculations for broadband, local access, equipment, and service alternatives. It provides a blueprint for cost reduction across all major technologies - from frame relay to IP telephony to contract recommendations. The text presents scenarios showing the effect of different architectural strategies for both voice and data communications. An Architectural Review lists alternatives to the traditional PBX and discusses how to minimize local access costs.

Here's a practical cost management guide to the complex world of voice, data and wireless telecommunications for the non-technical business professional. Examining the complex, highly technical telecommunications industry from an insider's point of view, it sifts through all the technical jargon, offers a comprehensive education on the applications, services and procurement of telecom products, and provides a strategy to effectively manage the costs of those products and services. The book enables you to: understand telecom services; audit phone bills; reduce the cost of existing services and eliminate unnecessary ones; and efficiently negotiate new contracts and services. This informative resource explains how providers of telecommunications services interwork and compete, focusing on pricing structures and options. Each section of this volume contains cost management advice, explains the technologies and service offerings of carriers, and illustrates complex concepts with case studies of companies in today's marketplace. Filled with cost management charts and graphics, problems to solve, and featuring an extensive reference section with terms and PIC codes, the book gives you the necessary tools to understand and reduce telecommunication costs.

The authors analyze regulatory reform and the emergence of competitionin network industries using the state-of-the-art theoretical tools ofindustrial organization, political economy, and the economics ofincentives.

This report addresses the regulation of access to telecommunication networks. Development of competition and the success of liberalisation often depend on the access terms and conditions chosen, and public policy interest in getting these terms and conditions right is important.

Michael A. Einhorn In continuing to deregulate telecommunications companies, regulators have begun to consider alternative approaches to traditional cost-based price regulation as a means of encouraging monopoly efficiency, promulgating technological innova tion, protecting consumers, and reducing administrative costs. Under cost-based regulatory procedures that had been used, prices were designed to recover the regulated company's costs plus an allowed rate of return on its rate base; this strategy was costly to administer, provided no consistent incentives to cost-ef ficiency and technological improvement, afforded many opportunities for strategic misrepresentation of reported costs, and may have encouraged both uneconomic expansion of the utility's rate base and cross-subsidization of its competitive services. A category of alternative regulatory approaches can be classified broadly as social contracts. Under the general strategy of social contract regulation, regulators first delimit a group of regulated core services that they continue to regulate and then stipulate a list of constraints that the utility must agree to meet in the future; in exchange, regulators agree to detariff or deregulate entirely other competitive or nonessential services that the utility may offer. As long as no stipulated constraints are violated, the utility may price freely any service; if it reduces costs, it may keep a share of its profits. According to the National Telecommunications Information Administration (NTIA, 1987), social contract agreements of one form or another have been considered or implemented in a majority of American states.