Economic Regulation Master Class

John is a highly experienced regulatory economist and commercial strategist with wide-ranging expertise covering both the broadcasting and telecommunications markets.  A trained economist and holder of an MBA from the London Business School, John has occupied a succession of senior posts covering economic analysis, regulatory affairs and interconnect strategy at the Independent Television Commission, Oftel, Telewest and Virgin Media.

Prior to joining InterConnect, John acted as an independent consultant specialising in market liberalisation, market development and the commercial challenges of Next Generation technologies, being the first cable industry representative on BT’s 21CN (NGN) Steering Board.  He has worked with broadcasting and telecoms regulators in the UK, US and the Middle East, and has substantial commercial experience in network access, pricing and interconnection issues.  In addition, John has also worked on strategy and business development issues for a number of operators in the UK and mainland Europe.

Hugh has 35 years experience in the telecoms sector. His early roles (with BT for example) focused on strategic planning and market analysis and this focus has remained central to much of the consulting work he has undertaken since. In addition to leading a number of major regulatory development projects in Europe and the Middle East, his recent work has covered 3G licensing, licence bid preparation, regulatory and commercial due diligence, interconnect pricing, the development of mobile cellular policy and universal funding.

Leo Borwick has worked in a variety of senior roles in the telecommunications industry for over 20 years, specialising in business modelling, pricing, regulatory policy and strategy. He has worked with fixed and mobile operators, challengers, ISPs, equipment suppliers and regulators in the UK, Europe, Africa and South East Asia. His recent work has focused on LRIC cost analysis, pricing strategy and price cap reviews. Recent assignments have included building LRIC cost models of fixed and mobile operators, assisting an industry body with developing a consensus on NGN interconnection, assisting the UK regulator, Ofcom, with their review of the future of mobile termination charges and developing a set of scenarios concerning the future of the communications industry for the City of London.

Phillipa Marks is a specialist in the analysis of economic, public policy and regulatory issues in the telecommunications and media industries and a leading expert in the development of economic approaches to spectrum management. Phillipa has advised a number of organisations on the implications of convergence for spectrum strategy, spectrum pricing and strategy and the potential constraints on the application of economic approaches to spectrum management.

Matthew Cherry is a regulatory and competition law specialist with experience across a range of regulated industries both as a consultant and working in-house in regulated telecommunications companies. He is an economist with a masters degree in economics from University College London. Matthew has recently joined FTI Consulting as a director. Prior to that he worked for five years at Hutchison 3G UK Limited (the UK 3G only mobile network operator), providing strategic regulatory advice on a wide range of cutting edge regulatory issues including spectrum licensing matters and call termination. He represented the company in the recently concluded Competition Commission inquiry into mobile call termination. He has detailed recent experience of dealing with mobile related regulatory matters in the UK and EU and has been involved in the regulatory debates around mobile cost modelling for over seven years.

Stuart Newstead has a 25-year track record in the fixed and mobile telecoms markets during which time he was a Vice President at O2 and a General Manager at BT. He has has been involved in economic regulation since 1993 and has played a leading role in challenging existing orthodoxies and creating new structures for the regulation of telecoms markets, both fixed and mobile. He was an architect of the UK’s first standard interconnect regime, now widely followed across the world, as well as the standard economic framework for mobile termination rates. Since 2002, he has been an independent consultant working with IT, internet and telco organisations such as AOL, Citrix, BT, T Mobile, Cisco, Sun Microsystems, Ofcom, NGNuk, ComReg (Ireland) and Jamaica’s Spectrum Management Authority.

Jonathan Porter is a Senior Economic Adviser at the UK regulator Ofcom and has worked in the field of competition and regulatory economics since 1994 when he worked as an economist in the mergers branch of the Office of Fair Trading. After the OFT, he worked at Oftel for three years before joining ntl as a regulatory economist where he was involved in the development of proposals for LLU and also in the ntl-Cable and Wireless merger. After just over three years at ntl, Jonathan joined the Independent Television Commission (ITC) where he remained through to creation of Ofcom which he joined in 2003. In the course of his work at Ofcom, Jonathan has dealt with a range of competition and regulatory issues including the pricing of DTT capacity, the economic analysis of the TV advertising market, issues around the development and exploitation of new media rights, and the use of cost-benefit analysis to inform policy decisions.

Jeremy Turk is an economist and strategist with some 20 years experience in telecommunications. After working for the Bank of England, Shell International and in academia, he was Manager of Regulatory Economics and Head of Strategic Economics at BT; while at BT he had close involvement with BT’s contribution to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission investigation of fixed number portability and with Ofcom’s Strategic Review. He was for several years Special Economic Advisor to the General Director of the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of Bahrain. He has taught and lectured on telecommunications regulation and economics and also acted as a consultant in telecommunications and more generally in the sphere of regional economic development.