The Economics of Telecommunication Services

This textbook characterizes the economics of telecommunication services from an engineering perspective. The authors bring out the fundamental drivers of the industry and characterize networks from a graph theoretic perspective, including random, small world, and scale free networks. The authors relate the topology of a telecommunication network using circuit and packet switched architectures to throughput and other performance parameters. The pricing model proposed in this book is based on the cost of displaced opportunity as opposed to the cost of the elements of the network engaged in delivering a service. The displaced opportunity is characterized by the revenue associated with the service that the network could have alternatively delivered most efficiently using an identical level of resources. The book addresses other topics such as regulation in legacy networks, and net neutrality. Finally, the book introduces the application of game theory in a multi-vendor, multi-services competitive marketplace. The book aims to bridge the gap between the science of economics as practiced by economists and practice of pricing from a telecommunication engineer’s perspective. This book is suitable for use by senior undergraduate or graduate students of telecommunication engineering or researchers and practitioners in telecommunication engineering.

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.