Ren muses:
> > Imagine if you could buy any phone you wanted and use it with any
> > operator. Operators would have to differentiate themselves on service
> > and price and contents.
Petr Ojala responds:
> Exactly and that's why I wonder if there's really any good reason for
> the operators to subsidize the phones....
There used to be one good reason: they were rather expensive to
make. Gallium Arsenide chips (needed to get into the required
operating frequencies, as I understand it) are not the easiest
things in the world to fabricate.
Another ongoing source of cost: miniaturization. I think it's only
very recently, in Japan, that you've gotten phones down to the
point where there's no reason to make them much smaller.
> There are perfectly good examples in the market that a country can
> achieve high mobile penetration in a short time even without
> subsidized phones?
Is this really true? Bear in mind that a guaranteed monopoly is
an indirect subsidy: the company doesn't have to pay the costs
of fending off the competition. If you're the only game in town,
of course you can charge what you want for the phone - up to,
and exceeding, cost. Pricing is then only a matter of how fast
you want to grow the market.
I don't know Finnish telecom, but my impression was one of
"regulated oligopoly".
Michael Turner
www.idiom.com/~turner
leap@gol.com
Received on Tue Jul 18 16:18:16 2000