At the opening, Sunil Bharti Mittal had announced that Airtel was raising prices. And I was the lead on the panel of tariff regulation on the second day. I was ready for fireworks, but it was sedate. Only spark was on why roaming prices were not regulated. I first talked about where prices levels were: South Asia with the lowest prices for voice (Bangladesh was the cheapest, though many Indians insist they are).
Banded forbearance, a concept we have been working on since early 2007 which was further developed in our interactions with the Communications Authority of the Maldives, has just been published as a refereed journal article by the International Journal of Regulation and Governance. A previous version of this article was selected for presentation at the CPRsouth 3 conference in Beijing in December 2008. The abstract is given below: Fast growing telecom markets, especially in the developing world, are attracting new types of users, especially those at the Bottom of the Pyramid (BOP). Innovative pricing is needed to respond to this increasingly heterogeneous demand. However, many regulators still claim to regulate prices using methods from the monopoly era, despite lacking capacity to effectively regulate proliferating tariff plans.