Unbundled access is an often practiced form of regulation during liberalization, where new entrants of the market (challengers) are offered access to facilities of the incumbent, that are hard to duplicate (e.g. for technical or business case reasons). Its applications are mostly found in network-oriented industries (like telecommunication, mail and energy) and often concerns the last mile.
Unbundled access differs from Bitstream access in that the incumbent offers fewer services at the last mile and the backhaul is not a part of the services.
Famous quotes containing the word access:
“Knowledge in the form of an informational commodity indispensable to productive power is already, and will continue to be, a major—perhaps the major—stake in the worldwide competition for power. It is conceivable that the nation-states will one day fight for control of information, just as they battled in the past for control over territory, and afterwards for control over access to and exploitation of raw materials and cheap labor.”
—Jean François Lyotard (b. 1924)