Browsing by Subject "Telecommunications"
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Item Open Access Essays on the Industrial Organization of Telecommunications Markets(2020) Nolan, ZacharyThis dissertation is an empirical study of the industrial organization of telecommunications markets. In recent years, online video has disrupted the telecommunications industry, driving large-scale investments in infrastructure, and raising policy questions about what role internet service providers (ISPs) should have in the treatment of online content. In the following three chapters, I study ISP incentives and the welfare implications of internet pricing policies.
The second chapter asks whether ISPs have an incentive to steer or influence the product choices of consumers. To answer this question, my coauthors and I leverage a unique household-level panel from a North American internet service provider (ISP) and exploit a policy change in which a subset of households are exposed to a change in internet pricing. We find that the introduction of usage-based pricing (UBP) led consumers to upgrade their internet service plans, lower overall internet usage, and increase the share of usage allocated to video. Our findings suggest that while steering consumers towards TV services is possible, it does not seem to be profitable as long as the ISP can offer rich pricing menus that allow it to capture some of the surplus generated by a better internet service. With the introduction of UBP, some third-party streaming video services lose subscribers, but overall usage of these services remains strong.
The third chapter studies the joint pricing of internet and TV subscriptions. Using a new panel of household-level data, I estimate a discrete-continuous model of household choices and find that when access to online video is removed, the average household's willingness-to-pay for their preferred bundle falls by 20%, or $38. Next, I use a model of bundle pricing to study the implications of alternative ISP strategies for pricing internet content. I find that foreclosure of online video is not profitable due to (i): the large contribution of online video access to internet valuations and (ii): low ISP margins on TV relative to internet. When given the option to set add-on prices for access to online video, the ISP chooses positive prices, and new surplus is unlocked through substitution from online video to TV.
Item Open Access High-fidelity, broadband stimulated-Brillouin-scattering-based slow light using fast noise modulation.(Opt Express, 2011-01-17) Zhu, Yunhui; Lee, Myungjun; Neifeld, Mark A; Gauthier, Daniel JWe demonstrate a 5-GHz-broadband tunable slow-light device based on stimulated Brillouin scattering in a standard highly-nonlinear optical fiber pumped by a noise-current-modulated laser beam. The noisemodulation waveform uses an optimized pseudo-random distribution of the laser drive voltage to obtain an optimal flat-topped gain profile, which minimizes the pulse distortion and maximizes pulse delay for a given pump power. In comparison with a previous slow-modulation method, eye-diagram and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) analysis show that this broadband slow-light technique significantly increases the fidelity of a delayed data sequence, while maintaining the delay performance. A fractional delay of 0.81 with a SNR of 5.2 is achieved at the pump power of 350 mW using a 2-km-long highly nonlinear fiber with the fast noise-modulation method, demonstrating a 50% increase in eye-opening and a 36% increase in SNR in the comparison.Item Open Access Racial Differences in the Effect of a Telephone-Delivered Hypertension Disease Management Program.(Journal of general internal medicine, 2012-08) Jackson, GL; Oddone, EZ; Olsen, MK; Powers, BJ; Grubber, JM; McCant, F; Bosworth, HBBACKGROUND: African Americans are significantly more likely than whites to have uncontrolled hypertension, contributing to significant disparities in cardiovascular disease and events. OBJECTIVE: The goal of this study was to examine whether there were differences in change in blood pressure (BP) for African American and non-Hispanic white patients in response to a medication management and tailored nurse-delivered telephone behavioral program. PARTICIPANTS: Five hundred and seventy-three patients (284 African American and 289 non-Hispanic white) primary care patients who participated in the Hypertension Intervention Nurse Telemedicine Study (HINTS) clinical trial. INTERVENTIONS: Study arms included: 1) nurse-administered, physician-directed medication management intervention, utilizing a validated clinical decision support system; 2) nurse-administered, behavioral management intervention; 3) combined behavioral management and medication management intervention; and 4) usual care. All interventions were activated based on poorly controlled home BP values. MAIN MEASURES: Post-hoc analysis of change in systolic and diastolic blood pressure. General linear models (PROC MIXED in SAS, version 9.2) were used to estimate predicted means at 6-month, 12-month, and 18-month time points, by intervention arm and race subgroups (separate models for systolic and diastolic blood pressure). KEY RESULTS: Improvement in mean systolic blood pressure post-baseline was greater for African American patients in the combined intervention, compared to African American patients in usual care, at 12 months (6.6 mmHg; 95 % CI: -12.5, -0.7; p = 0.03) and at 18 months (9.7 mmHg; -16.0, -3.4; p = 0.003). At 18 months, mean diastolic BP was 4.8 mmHg lower (95 % CI: -8.5, -1.0; p = 0.01) among African American patients in the combined intervention arm, compared to African American patients in usual care. There were no analogous differences for non-Hispanic white patients. CONCLUSIONS: The combination of home BP monitoring, remote medication management, and telephone tailored behavioral self-management appears to be particularly effective for improving BP among African Americans. The effect was not seen among non-Hispanic white patients.Item Open Access Regulatory Uncertainty: The Impact of the 2015 Open Internet Order on Broadband Infrastructure Investment(2018-04-18) Burkholder, Dane; Lim, Chin JieThis paper analyzes the impact of the United States Federal Communication's (FCC) March 2015 Open Internet Order (OIO) on broadband infrastructure investment outcomes such as changes in speed of services, market entry. We find that higher broadband investment levels deter potential entrants and may weed out competition amongst incumbent ISPs from December 2014 to December 2016. The 2015 OIO appears to have negatively impacted the probability of an ISP entering a census block for the first time by 7.17% during any six-month time periods from June 2015 to December 2016 compared to the time period from June 2010 to December 2014.