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In virtually every country, the price of residential access to the telephone network is kept low and cross-subsidized by business services, long distance calling, and various other telephone services. This pricing practice is widely defended as necessary to promote "universal service," but Crandall and Waverman show that it has little effect on telephone subscriptions while it has major harmful effects on the value of all telephone service. The higher prices for long distance calls reduce calling, shift the burden of paying for the network to those whose social networks are widely dispersed. Therefore, many poor and rural households--the intended beneficiaries of the pricing strategy--are forced to pay far more for telephone service than they would if prices reflected the cost of service. Despite these burdens, Congress has extended the subsidies to advanced services for schools, libraries, and rural health facilities. Crandall and Waverman show that other regulated utilities are not burdened with similarly inefficient cross-subsidy schemes, yet universality of water, natural gas, and electricity service is achieved. As local telephone service competition develops in the wake of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, the universal-service subsidy system will have to change. Subsidies will have to be paid from taxes on telecom services and paid directly to carriers or subscribers. Crandall and Waverman show that an intrastate tax designed to pay for each state's subsidized subscriptions is far less costly to the economy than an interstate tax. Robert W. Crandall is a senior fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution. Leonard Waverman is a visiting professor at the London Business School, on leave from the University of Toronto. They are coauthors of Talk Is Cheap: The Promise of Regulatory Reform in North American Telecommunications (Brookings, 1995).
The rapid pace of technological change is placing the world's telephone companies in a very difficult position. Fiber optics cables, wireless telephones, digital signal compression, and sophisticated new switching equipment are lowering the cost of providing service and opening the gates to new competition. At the same time, these new technologies are providing the telephone companies with a wide array of new market opportunities. Unfortunately, their status as regulated carriers makes it difficult to exploit these new opportunities and to fend off competitive assaults on their traditional telephone business. As long as they are regulated, they can be accused of using their monopoly services to cross-subsidize new competitive ventures. But partial deregulation and open entry would be a catastrophe for them unless they were allowed to revise their rate structure. There is a widespread misconception that the U.S. telecommunications industry has been "deregulated" and that Canadian authorities are following the U.S. lead. In fact, most services remain regulated, even though some markets, such as long-distance services, equipment sales and rentals, and local services, have been opened up. This book reviews the recent changes in the structure of U.S. and Canadian telecommunications industries and the changes in regulatory policy on both sides of the border. The authors analyze the effects of these changes in regulation on telephone rates in both the local and long-distance markets with particular emphasis on the impacts of regulatory reforms and competition on long-distance rates. They use their results to suggest how regulation should be structured to allow competition to replace monopoly on the road to the information superhighway. The authors contend that for decades misguided regulation of the telephone sector in both Canada and the U.S. denied consumers the benefits of competition, distorted local and long-distance telephone rates, and blocked en
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