Infrastructure and service provider games in crowdsourced networks

Abstract

Our paper analyzes the role that crowdsourced community network (CN) infrastructures could undertake in coping with the financing needs of ambitious broadband connectivity visions. Key to this role are open business models fostering synergies of CNs with commercial Internet Service Providers (SPs). In such synergies, the SPs make their pricing policies commensurate with the investment of the community in order to fuel the CN growth and generate a market for their services. At the same time, they compete with each other for customer shares in this market. We formulate the leader-follower game that emerges out of the strategic interactions of the actors and compute numerically its equilibrium states under a broad range of scenarios drawing on real data. In all cases, our results point to mutual profits for all actors, rendering such synergies win-win strategies.