L I R N E . N E T

The Dutch Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR), concerned about the future of their national infrastructures, have prepared a report, Infrastructures: Time to Invest, that is likely to be of interest beyond the Netherlands. “The WRR is concerned about the quality of Dutch infrastructures [sewers, energy, telecom, water, etc.] in the long term. The attention devoted by administrators and market players to short-term effects geared towards efficiency, consumer interest and cost, has a detrimental effect on investment in the public interest in the long term.”

Download the report’s table of contents and executive summary here.

A collection of papers (including Professor Bill Melody’s “Private Equity Funds and Public Utilities: Where Incentive Structures Collide”), were prepared for this report and published under New Perspectives on Investment in Infrastructures (v19 jun 08) by Amsterdam University Press. These are also available for download. Click here for the information page or here to download the collection in .pdf.

(more…)

Vic Hayes and Wolter Lemstra of the Economics of Infrastructures section in the Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management at Delft University of Technology, have co-authored a paper entitled, Unlicensed: The case of Wi-Fi, which argues that the current day success of Wi-Fi is a combined result of (1) a change in the US communications policy in the 1980s; (2) the industry leadership provided by NCR to create a global standard; and (3) the influence of the users that moved the application of Wireless-LANs from the enterprise to the home, from indoor to outdoor use, from a communications product to a service, and from operators to end-users as the provider of that service. This paper was presented at the Genesis of Unlicensed Wireless Policy Conference at George Mason University School of Law in April 2008, and will appear in a forthcoming issue of info.

Click here to download a preprint version of the paper.
Click here to download the conference (.ppt) presentation.

(more…)

The Center for Communication, Media and Information Technologies (CMI) is hosting its yearly Political Economy of Information and Communication Technologies Ph.D. Summer School, in Skagen Denmark. The course includes lectures by researchers from Aalbourg University and the other universities in the NordICT network and by invited lecturers from other research institutions. The topic of this year’s course is: Political Economy of Information and Communication Technologies. The summer school will take place from Sunday 24 August to Friday 29 August 2008.

Deadline for registration: 1 June 2008.
Click here to go to the CMI Skagen summer school webpage.

(more…)

LIRNE.NET researchers from the Center for ICT at the Danish Technical University have recently moved to the Center for Communication, Media and Information Technologies (CMI) at Aalborg University. CMI will join the other LIRNE centres in Europe with researchers continuing their participation in LIRNE research, events and South-North dialogue, from their new home.

Click here to go to the CMI website.

(more…)

[22-23 May 2008] The Economics of Infrastructures section in the Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management at Delft University of Technology, will hold its 11th Economics of Infrastructures Conference on the theme of Transitions in Utility Infrastructures. Regulators and representatives from industry will present their views on and discuss the latest developments in the governance of infrastructures. The conference will be a mixture of plenary keynote session and workshops addressing specific transition issues. Keynote speakers will address the transition in either a specific sector (energy, telecom, water) or from a specific perspective (sociological, technological, economic, political, historical).

Click here to go to the conference webpage.

(more…)