This edited book serves as a companion volume to the Seventh INFORMS Telecommunications Conference held in Boca Raton, Florida, March 7-10, 2004. The 18 papers in this book were carefully selected after a thorough re view process. The research presented within these articles focuses on the latest methodological developments in three key areaspricing of telecommunica tions services, network design, and resource allocationthat are most relevant to current telecommunications planning. With the global deregulation of the telecommunications industry, effective pricing and revenue management, as well as an understanding of competi tive pressures are key factors that will improve revenue in telecommunica tions companies. Chapters 1-5 address these topics by focusing on pricing of telecommunications services. They present some novel ideas related to pricing (including auction-based pricing of network bandwidth) and modeling compe tition in the industry. The successful telecommunications companies of the future will likely be the ones that can minimize their costs while meeting customer expectations. In this context the optimal design/provisioning of telecommunication networks plays an important role. Chapters 6-12 address these topics by focusing on net work design for a wide range of technologies including SONET, SDH, WDM, and MPLS. They include the latest research developments related to the mod eling and solving of network design problems. Day-to-day management/control of telecommunications networks is depen dent upon the optimal allocation of resources. Chapters 13-18 provide insight ful solutions to several intriguing resource allocation problems.
