World Dialogue on Regulation

Lead centre: Media & Communications, LSE - Contacts: Robin Mansell & Claire Milne

Understanding affordability is key to understanding telecom demand which, in turn, is central to sound business cases for investment and the achievement of network development.  This project is the first stage in producing a toolkit for improving telecom affordability alongside improvements in accessibility.  The project is in part a scoping study, and will produce plans for completing the toolkit as well as some initial elements of the toolkit.

Desk research involves the collection of relevant data from as many countries as possible, with a focus on developing countries.  This includes:

1. existing consumer research findings relevant to telecom affordability;
2. information on innovative service offerings designed for affordability, e.g. virtual telephony, real-time tariffing;
3. current fixed, mobile and internet tariffs, with evidence on their take-up by lower usage and lower income groups;
4. available information on demand elasticities;
5. special “social” tariffs, their history and take-up, and net costs to service providers; and
6. statistics on household expenditure on telecom services.

Fieldwork is being undertaken in selected countries to investigate key factors influencing affordability in depth. The completed toolkit resulting from the analysis of the data will be available for updating by others, and this maintenance stage will require relatively little resource.

The toolkit is planned to include, for example: 1) selected available survey data on patterns of household expenditure on communications, analysed to support forecasting (this will be especially useful for countries that lack their own survey data); 2) tariff information enabling people with little relevant background to compare the price of given usage “baskets” in different countries; 3) a “menu” of special tariff options, indicating costs and benefits of each, and what is likely to be appropriate in what circumstances; 4) examples of relevant good practices, including both cost-reduction and pricing/packaging/marketing initiatives; 5) market research and consumer behaviour studies, covering for example how people start to save on alternative means of communications (including transport) once telecom services become available to them, and how telecom can help with income generation; 6) available evidence on demand elasticities for telecommunications in developing countries.

Project Director: Professor Robin Mansell, Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics and Political Science

Principal Researcher: Claire Milne, Visiting Researcher, Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics and Independent Consultant.

This project is undertaken for LIRNE.NET’s Preparing for WSIS: ICT Research and Dissemination Programme, funded by IDRC, Canada.