Unlicensed spectrum has been viewed as a way to increase competition in wireless access and promote innovation in new technologies and business models. However, several recent papers have shown that the openness of such spectrum can also lead to it becoming over congested when used by competing wireless service providers (SPs). This in turn can result in the SPs making no profit and may deter them from entering the market. However, this prior work assumes that unlicensed access is a separate service from any service offered using licensed spectrum. Here, we instead consider the more common case were service providers bundle both licensed and unlicensed spectrum as a single service and offer this with a single price. We analyze a model for such a market and show that in this case SPs are able to gain higher profit than the case without bundling. It is also possible to get higher social welfare with bundling. Moreover, we explore the case where SPs are allowed to manage the customers' average percentage of time they receive service on unlicensed spectrum and characterize the social welfare gap between the profit maximizing and social welfare maximizing setting.
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Price Competition with LTE-U and WiFi
LTE-U is an extension of the Long Term Evolution
(LTE) standard for operation in unlicensed spectrum. LTE-U
differs from WiFi, the predominant technology used in unlicensed
spectrum in that it utilizes a duty cycle mode for accessing the
spectrum and allows for a more seamless integration with LTE
deployments in licensed spectrum. There have been a number
of technical studies on the co-existence of LTE-U and WiFi in
unlicensed spectrum In this paper, we instead investigate the
impact of such a technology from an economic perspective.
We consider a model in which an incumbent service provider
(SP) deploys a duty cycle-based technology like LTE-U in an
unlicensed band along with operating in a licensed band and
competes with one or more entrants that only operate in the
unlicensed band using a different technology like WiFi. We
characterize the impact of a technology like LTE-U on the market
outcome and show that the welfare impacts of this technology are
subtle, depending in part on the amount of unlicensed spectrum
and number of entrants. We also investigate the impact of the
duty cycle and the portion of unlicensed spectrum used by the
technology.
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- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10178790
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE INFOCOM
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 901 to 909
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/INFOCOM.2019.8737549
