I've just read a recent (well, Nov 2005) paper by Ralf Dewenter & Jörn Kruse which compares the experience of 84 countries
... under both regimes, where 39 countries have applied CPP from the beginning of mobile telephony, 31 have switched from RPP to CPP, and 14 countries have applied RPP from the introduction of mobile telephony up to 2003...
Given the extensive discussion triggered by my original comment in April (follow up here & here), I was pleased to see someone assemble a significant data set and do some analysis.
In previous studies people have concluded that CPP leads to higher prices and the need for further regulatory intervention. The one claimed advantage of CPP was that it led to more rapid adoption of mobile telephony. Now it is clear that even that advantage is not true.
we find ... that CPP has no statistically significant impact on subscriber penetration. Neither switching countries nor original CPP countries have been found to show a significantly higher number of subscribers. We therefore expect that a switch from CPP to RPP would not reduce penetration rates, independently whether a country’s penetration process has just started or has nearly reached saturation levels. Thus, applying RPP instead of CPP seems to be a feasible tool to reduce market power and mobile termination rates and additionally to make the regulation of termination fees redundant.
Of course once you get regulatory environments in place, like CPP, you rapidly accumulate vested interests and it becomes difficult to change no matter how beneficial a change would be. Indeed, while they had 31 countries that switched to CPP, none have so far been able to go the deregulatory direction, i.e. switch to RPP, despite the high prices with CPP and the increasing evidence that RPP is better.
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