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This study aims to estimate the quality-adjusted changes in residential mobile consumer prices by controlling for the changes in the relevant service characteristics and quality, in a case study on Hungary between 2015 and 2021; compare the results with changes measured by the traditionally calculated official telecommunications price index of the Statistical Office; and discuss separating the hedonic price changes from the effect of a specific government intervention that occurred in Hungary, namely, the significant reduction in the value added tax rate (VAT) levied on internet services.

Since the price of commercial mobile offers does not directly reflect the continuous improvements in service characteristics and functionalities over time, the price changes need to be adjusted for changes in quality. The authors use hedonic regression analysis to address this issue.

The results show significant hedonic price changes over the observed seven-year period of over 30%, which turns out to be primarily driven by the significant developments in the comprising service characteristics and not the VAT policy change.

This paper contributes to the literature on hedonic price analyses on complex telecommunications service plans and enhances this methodology by using weights and analysing the content-related features of the mobile packages.

The paper aims to discuss the expected changes 5G will bring to the assessment of active mobile network sharing agreements from a competition policy point of view.

The paper distinguishes between current, early 5G networks and the fully-fledged 5G envisioned for the future, then focuses on the main competition concerns where 5G may bring the most significant changes in the evaluation compared to 4G.

The authors find that while network sharing for early 5G can be evaluated in a similar way to previous generations, fully-fledged 5G can raise new issues. The authors predict these main concerns to be service differentiation, cost commonality between the parties and the parties’ ability and incentives to grant access to critical inputs to downstream competitors. Due to the huge costs of 5G rollout, network sharing is set to become even more widespread than before. For each of the concerns, the authors show that they are not easy to substantiate and they may even become less serious than under 4G.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is one of the first contributions to analyse the impact of fully-fledged 5G on mobile network sharing agreements’ competitive assessment.