Abstract
Developing countries have embarked on the promotion
of “ICT access for all” through subsidized Information and
Communication Technologies (ICTs), especially in underserviced
areas of such countries. The main aim of the “ICT access for
all” is to extend the communication services to the large areas
of underserviced regions through subsidized communication
services. In some instances, subsidies may lead to high ICT
penetration and high resource utilization while in some instances
unsubsidized services may lead to low utilization of resources and
low ICT penetration, which may eventually lead to market failure
and destroy market efficiency. With explicitly defined objectives,
regarding subsidy policy, however, developing countries always
fall short on the implementation of such subsidy policy due to
economic reasons and unrealistic subsidy driven pricing models.
In this paper we investigate the impact of subsidy driven pricing
model on resource utilization and revenue maximization in a
developing country. In this paper we try to find a middle ground
between promoting “ICT access for all” (given a subsidy and
diverse income variations between the groups) and resource
utilization in a network.