Competitive Wireless Multi-Access - Implications and Research Issues

No single wireless access solution or radio technology is capable of providing affordable wireless access in all scenarios and for all user needs. Large investments are already made in existing networks and technologies that already provide cost efficient solutions for certain applications, e.g. wide-area voice and medium rate data WLANs etc. However, multimode terminals can adapt to both new services and new wireless access technologies in a much faster, flexible and more cost efficient way than the infrastructure itself. The fact that "full coverage" not necessary for all access options is probably the key factor. Infrastructure can be incrementally deployed, where needed and cost efficient. Effective access competition may provide additional benefits for the users but will create disruptive changes as well as new opportunities and cost reduction benefits to infrastructure providers. New research issues related to competitive access include access advertising and negotiation as well as competitive radio resource management. The paper will discuss these implication and outline some of the new research topics and research projects where they are studied