This volume focuses on the main determinants of growth for mobile telecommunications from an economic perspective; it does not address telecommunications finance, business operations, enhanced technologies and architectures, or the impact of service creation, though these might be more fundamental drivers of sustainable development in that sector. The only points of view taken are those of regulators and operators, not those of systems suppliers, standardization bodies, financial markets, or the industry at large.

Chapter 1 introduces the subject, addressing, in general terms, the business strategies of firms and radio spectrum availability as determinants of market structure. A very long chapter 2 relates alternative and successive wireless technologies with revenues and costs. The history part of this chapter, pages 10 through 28, is interesting, but suffers from a lack of references to government or military systems, and misses out on initial technology and social drivers. Closer to today, the importance of the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) in aligning the three adopted International Telecommunications Union (ITU) standards is ignored. Also missing are elements about how fixed revenues and public research subsidized mobile investments.

An interesting chapter 3 presents a country-by-country survey, mostly covering Europe with very little coverage of Asia, of the policy implications for mobile adoption up to the mid-1990s. This is followed in chapter 4 by a classical econometric logistic diffusion model, with some empirical results from the 1990s for two groups of countries (lesser developed countries, and others). It assumes that licensing schemes, costs, and timing are essential elements, surpassing the learning curve effects on terminals and social networking drivers. Chapter 5 covers theories of product differentiation strategies, market behavior, and the price of welfare analysis and contradictions. There is also an exposé of a game theoretical model with homogeneous horizontally differentiated and vertically differentiated voice products, largely driven by concepts from fixed communications. There is no theoretical exposé of the implications of Internet protocol (IP) and messaging !in wireless network pricing. Chapter 6 is essentially a history of the 3G spectrum auctions and “beauty contests” in Europe, with the corresponding licensing procedures. There is only a short discussion of the economic reasoning behind not using auctions in some European or Asian markets. Chapter 7 discusses the theoretical consequences of this on the market structure and its profitability, using a simplified Cournot game with licenses. The first appendix discusses radio spectrums as a scarce resource, and the second appendix contains some working principles of wireless communications systems. There is a bibliography, with mostly academic and governmental references, an index, and detailed lists of figures and tables.

The volume is an interesting academic collection of selected works and surveys, mostly from the 1990s. It also presents some econometric models, which can be useful for data analysis. The book does not, however, reflect the complexity, dynamics, and social drivers behind demand, nor the changing supply paradigms forced by technology and stronger competition; in particular, almost nothing is said about the network of mobile Internet services from the economic point of view [1].