 be excepted from open availability at wholesale prices to competitive service providers. Telecommunications pricing A major factor, perhaps the key factor, driving future telecommunications demand and thus infrastructure investment, is price. The enormous sums recently paid for VoIP companies are a witness to the expected success of such low-price services. All of this is being driven by price and price competition resulting from opening the telecommunications market to both infrastructure and service competition. With media and communications convergence, multiple plays of voice calls, messaging and now TV media over broadband, competing multiple access infrastructures are being offered: Mobile broadband (3.5G and AWTs). INFRASTRUCTURE TO 2030: TELECOM, LAND TRANSPORT, WATER AND ELECTRICITY - ISBN 92-64-02398-4 © OECD 2006 2. TELECOMS INFRASTRUCTURE TO 2030 Mobile narrowband (2G, 2.5G and early 3G). Cable TV - interactive and other. Fixed Wireless broadband. xDSL local loop broadband. Digital PSTN (dial-up at up to 56 kbps). Many of these local loop technologies lead back to common backbone fibre optic technologies for Internet access, but possibly via competing bulk traffic networks with service competition for Internet access (via broadband or dial-up). In such a situation current service prices can be challenged. Current voice pricing varies by call duration, time of day, distance, domestic or international, and package of bundled services, especially in mobile. In contrast Internet access is most usually flat monthly charges for all that can be consumed. For VoIP charging - for instance, the service provider Skype's tariffs for Internet telephony - they are structured around the destination of the call only and the associated termination charges, rather than, as with PSTN and cellular mobile telephony, a combination of the destination and the origin. It thus costs the same to call Japan using Skype, irrespective of whether the calling party is in Australia, France or Japan: Table 2.9. SKYPE international ch