# Quantifying the Benefits of Infrastructure Sharing

## TL;DR

This paper examines the economic and strategic benefits of infrastructure sharing among telecom operators, demonstrating that sharing can be advantageous even in competitive scenarios with complex cost structures.

## Contribution

It provides a theoretical analysis of sharing benefits, comparing competitive and cooperative dynamics with non-convex cost functions involving fixed costs.

## Key findings

- Sharing can benefit providers even under competitive pressure.
- Cooperative sharing can lead to more efficient coverage deployment.
- Analysis of equilibria in non-convex cost scenarios.

## Abstract

We analyze the benefits of network sharing between telecommunications operators. Sharing is seen as one way to speed the roll out of expensive technologies such as 5G since it allows the service providers to divide the cost of providing ubiquitous coverage. Our theoretical analysis focuses on scenarios with two service providers and compares the system dynamics when they are competing with the dynamics when they are cooperating. We show that sharing can be beneficial to a service provider even when it has the power to drive the other service provider out of the market, a byproduct of a non-convex cost function. A key element of this study is an analysis of the competitive equilibria for both cooperative and non-cooperative 2-person games in the presence of (non-convex) cost functions that involve a fixed cost component.