Abstract

The purpose is to compare internet prices of the nation’s Internet Service Providers (ISPs) with the aim of ranking them to find out the low cost leaders in the industry. Generally the local ISPs employ the strategy of volume-tiered pricing. Volume-tiered strategies exhibit greater complexity in pricing, more opaque prices and sometimes, even higher prices. The advantage of volume-based pricing for operators is that the uncertainty and risk of consumption remains with the customer, rather than the operator. In addition the ISPs offer disparate data volumes and price points with many of them unique so as to perhaps discourage direct comparisons with one another. This paper overcame the issue of complexity, opacity and the dissimilarities in data offerings by fitting regression functions to the data of the competing ISPs and examining the behaviors of the generated graphs across a broad range. The study clearly identified the low cost leaders in the local ISP industry. Currently there is no national ranking system to find out the relative placements of the ISPs in their various service offerings. The contribution represents one of the first times internet service prices in the country have been analytically studied to identify the ISPs with the best prices. may be useful to political decision-makers and regulatory authorities. ch indicate the complexity of the audited firm and the characteristics of the audit.

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