Population Distribution and Telecommunication Costs
Staff research paper
Population Distribution and Telecommunication Costs by Peter Cribbett was released on 2 August 2000. The study is part of the Productivity Commission's research into the performance of Australia's Economic infrastructure industries. Its aim is to provide information on the influence of line density on cross-country price comparisons by estimating the differences in average line costs that can be attributed solely to differences in the way populations (and hence lines) are distributed.
A Supplementary Analysis to this paper has also been released and should be read in conjunction with that Paper. The supplementary analyses presented were undertaken at the suggestion of interested parties and because of the Commission's desire to enrich the analysis by examining other countries and US States. This analysis covers the US States examined by Ovum in their study for the ACCC into overseas access charges where the influence of line density was considered. Also see:
The Commission proposes to undertake additional analysis for its current international benchmarking study, which will compare the relative levels of telecommunications services between rural and remote areas and cities across a number of countries. The results of this work may be added to this supplement as this study progresses.
Related publications include:
- International Benchmarking of Telecommunications Prices and Price Changes
- International Benchmarking of Australian Telecommunications Services
CONTENTS
Preliminaries
Cover, Copyright, Preface, Acknowledgements, Contents, Abbreviations, Key Points
1 Introduction
1.1 Purpose
1.2 Recent studies
1.3 Scope
1.4 Consultation
1.5 Refereeing
2 Research method
2.1 Cost functions
2.2 Line density distributions
2.3 Cost estimates
3 Population and line density distributions
3.1 Population distributions
3.2 Line distributions
4 Line cost estimates
4.1 Estimates of relative line costs
4.2 Some qualifications
4.3 Robustness of the results
4.4 Further research
APPENDICES
A Recent studies
A.1 Ovum 1998 - An assessment of Telstra’s access undertakings
A.2 Alger and Leung 1999 - The relative costs of telephony across five countries
A.3 Comment
B Methodology
B.1 Estimating population densities
B.2 Converting population to line densities
B.3 Choosing and constructing the cost functions
C Further results, sensitivity analysis and some qualifications
C.1 Cost schedules
C.2 Line distributions based on the concordance function
C.3 Line distributions based on simple proportionality
C.4 Results for high and low density areas
References
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