The GSMA has declared 2025 to be ‘The Year of Spectrum Renewals’. While licensees understandably argue for an extension or automatic re-assignment, there are good reasons for not dismissing competitive procedures. Benefits from supporting adjustments to spectrum holding suggest using a hybrid approach.

See this paper for more details.

More and more countries are looking at how to grow aquaculture in an environmentally sustainable way. Here’s a brief discussion paper setting out some suggestions on how the licensing process, and the use of auctions for managing licences, can help to control the environmental impact of aquaculture.

The paper is available here.

Fixed links – radio links between two points (point-to-point) or less commonly between one point and several end points (point-to-multipoint) – are crucial inputs in mobile backhaul, fixed wireless access and many other uses. As bandwidth requirements have increased substantially and fibre is not an option everywhere, demand for fixed links and the underlying radio spectrum remains high.

The Irish Telecoms regulator, ComReg, commissioned DotEcon and Axon Partners to review its fixed links licensing framework and recommend adjustments to to support the varied use cases into the future. We developed a simple fee formula that proxies the opportunity costs of each link and made recommendations on available frequency bands, the licensing process and technical conditions. Read more here.

ComReg has published a study by DotEcon (with the support of Analysys Mason) into the resilience of networks and the occurrence of network incidents. It explores the prevalence and impact of connectivity outages using crowd-sourced big data and a large-scale consumer survey, capturing the heterogeneous consumer experiences of network outages.

We measure the relative performance of different platforms and find that diversity in backhaul networks is associated with greater reliability. There is evidence of power laws at work in the likelihood of outages of different scales, with a long tail of high impact events.

Consumers’ unmet demand for reliability would justify an investment of at least €2 billion into improving resilience, similar in scale to the Irish state’s contribution to its National Broadband Plan.

The Financial Conduct Authority has published a study by DotEcon on how the UK Government might structure, regulate and procure a consolidated tape provider (CTP). Following the Edinburgh Reforms of wholesale financial markets, the UK Government proposes to create a consolidated feed of trading data from across all UK trading venues and approved publication arrangements, likely for bonds first and subsequently equities.

Our study forms part of the FCA’s consultation and considers the case for an exclusive CTP for each asset class, what obligations it might operate under and how a CTP might be appointed through a competitive process.

With the growing role played by wind energy, sites for the construction of wind farms are becoming a sought-after resource, especially in relation to off-shore wind. Where wind farm operators may previously have asked for subsidies, they are now prepared to pay for access to possible sites.

National governments resort to auctions for the allocation of these scarce public resources. The design of such processes has to take account of the specific needs of operators and the nature of the sites offered and to ensure that newly constructed capacity can be integrated into the transmission grid.

We were commissioned by the Netherlands Enterprise Agency – a part of the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy – to look at options for auctioning multiple permits for the construction of off-shore wind farms. The report setting out our recommendations can be found here.