Mobile network operators are facing the difficult task of significantly increasing capacity to meet projected demand while keeping CAPEX and OPEX down. We argue that infrastructure sharing is a key consideration in operators' planning of the evolution of their networks, and that such planning can be viewed as a stage in the cognitive cycle. In this paper, we present a framework to model this planning process while taking into account both the ability to share resources and the constraints imposed by competition regulation (the latter quantified using the Herfindahl index). Using real-world demand and deployment data, we find that the ability to share infrastructure essentially moves capacity from rural, sparsely populated areas (where some of the current infrastructure can be decommissioned) to urban ones (where most of the next-generation base stations would be deployed), with significant increases in resource efficiency. Tight competition regulation somewhat limits the ability to share but does not entirely jeopardize those gains, while having the secondary effect of encouraging the wider deployment of next-generation technologies.
Works such as @cite_9 focus on economic aspects of resource sharing from a network virtualization perspective. It describes the incentives operators have to pool their resources together. From an implementation perspective, the analysis of cooperative sharing arrangements presented in @cite_5 highlights the diversity of approaches currently being used in existing networks, their successes and failures. It points to a process of learning within industry as to which sharing modes allow for both competition and cooperative sharing to thrive. A study of Pakistan's experience of network sharing indicates the varying economic gains made in a still-developing market by adopting different sharing strategies @cite_20 .
@cite_5 @cite_9 @cite_20
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This paper address issues about cooperation among and competition between mobile network operators. The starting point is to examine why and how operators share infrastructure for mobile communication services, so called network sharing. The paper analyzes drivers, benefits and obstacles of network cooperation. We also analyze how roles and responsibilities are distributed for the network related functions while concurrently operators compete for customers and have separate functionality for service provisioning, marketing, customer relation management, charging and billing. Next, we analyze how network sharing as such and strategies for network sharing have changed in Sweden from the year 2000 when the 3G licenses were awarded and up to the year 2010. Moreover, network sharing in Sweden is compared with India where the market situation is different, as the number of operators is four times more and the cooperation is organized in another way, with separate tower companies, which provides base stations sites where operators are tenants. Finally, we compare the network sharing cases with how mobile operators organize cooperation for mobile payments services. From our empirical data we can identify four different types of co-opetition among mobile operators. 1. A co-operative spirit with focus on working practices and or principles that will facilitate the common use of resources or solutions. 2. Infrastructure cooperation through a third party, e.g. a tower company or a SMS aggregator with the main objective to reduce costs or to provide a common solution. The operators have agreements with a third party but not with each other. 3. Infrastructure cooperation through a joint venture that is responsible for network deployment and operation. The driver is to achieve cost-savings. The operators have their own service provisioning, billing, customer relations management and compete for end-users. 4. Service and infrastructure cooperation through a joint venture that is fully responsible for providing the end-user service, in our case mobile payments. The main driver is to offer a payment solution common for all operators in order to complement or compete with solutions provided by banks or payment service providers. The cellular mobile industry in Pakistan has shown an unprecedented growth since the promulgation of Pakistan Telecommunication (Reorganization) Act of 1996. Over 90 million cellular mobile users and penetration grew to 55.6 and 4.8 million landlines connections provide a teledensity of 58.8 to the nation. The mobile networks provide coverage to over 90 percent of the population. During 2007–08 mobiles traffic exceeded 42 billion minutes while ARPU decreased to US @math 3.12 billion while the share of telecommunication sector in GDP was 2.0 . Telecom companies invested over US @math 2 billion during 2007–08 for expansion of its CMPak networks. The mobile sector paid over a billion dollars in taxes to the National Exchequer during the year 2007–08. The telecom sector received above US$ 1.438 billion FDI, i.e., 28 of the total FDI and helped create over one million jobs since the deregulation of the telecom sector began. The competitive pressures and decline in ARPU has increased the need for improving technical as well as economic efficiencies. Our analyses indicate there are serious economic efficiencies embedded in infrastructure sharing paradigm for mobile operators. Only the passive sharing of additional sites can yield CAPEX savings of over 5000 million US dollars and OPEX savings of these sites can yield another billion US dollars every year. It is thus concluded that the growing business model of decoupling the revenues from that of mobile traffic warrant serious consideration.