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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The Economics of Bundling Content with Unlicensed Wireless Service
Adding new unlicensed wireless spectrum is a promising approach to accommodate increasing traffic demand. However, unlicensed spectrum may have a high risk of becoming congested, and service providers (SPs) may have difficulty to differentiate their wireless services when offering them on the same unlicensed spectrum. When SPs offer identical services, the resulting competition can lead to zero profits. In this work, we consider the case where an SP bundles its wireless service with a content service. We show that this can differentiate the SPs’ services and lead to positive SP profits. In particular, we study the characteristics of the content services that an SP should bundle with its wireless service, and analyze the impact of bundling on consumer surplus.
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- PAR ID:
- 10179968
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Lecture notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering
- Volume:
- 277
- ISSN:
- 1867-822X
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 93-108
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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