Introduction

We focus in this chapter on network service providers, which are operators offering network capabilities to “others” (end-users, content providers, application/service providers, etc.). As evidenced in Chapter 1, the last decades have witnessed a multiplication of the number of such network service providers, proposing a variety of services. We have, as examples, wired access operators, wireless operators, transport operators, and bandwidth brokers, all of which now coexist in the increasingly complex telecommunications ecosystem. The relationships between those stakeholders can be of very different natures: one can indeed find customer-provider interactions, competition situations, cases with service providers as peers needing to collaborate, and quite often some complex combinations of those (e.g., the case of mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs), which rent their infrastructure from a wireless operator they will be competing with).

Among those relationships, the competition aspect has been exacerbated by regulators, with the purpose of benefiting users. Indeed, the regulators' objective is in general to ensure fair behavior of actors for the good of society. Their actions in particular aim at favoring new entrants in the market, especially at the access network level, by applying strong anti-trust policies, and by favoring user churn – i.e., users switching between providers. For example, in France, the latest 4G operator, Free, was supported by the regulatory authority forcing incumbent operators to lease some of their resource until Free develops its own infrastructure; this led to an overall decrease of access prices.