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Telecommunication service providers (telcos) are exposedto cyber-attacks executed by compromised IoT devicesconnected to their customers’ networks. Such attacks mighthave severe effects on the attack target, as well as the telcosthemselves. To mitigate those risks, we propose a machinelearning-based method that can detect specific vulnerable IoTdevice models connected behind a domestic NAT, therebyidentifying home networks that pose a risk to the telcosinfrastructure and service availability. To evaluate our method,we collected a large quantity of network traffic data fromvarious commercial IoT devices in our lab and comparedseveral classification algorithms. We found that (a) the LGBMalgorithm produces excellent detection results, and (b) ourflow-based method is robust and can handle situations forwhich existing methods used to identify devices behind a NATare unable to fully address, e.g., encrypted, non-TCP or non-DNS traffic. To promote future research in this domain weshare our novel labeled benchmark dataset.

5G is the fifth generation wireless technology for digital cellular networks that began wide deployment in 2019. As with previous standards, the covered areas are divided into regions called "cells", serviced by individual antennas. Virtually every major telecommunication service provider in the developed world is deploying antennas or intends to deploy them soon. The frequency spectrum of 5G is divided into millimetre waves, mid-band and low-band. Low-band uses a similar frequency range as the predecessor. The 5G networks will form a part of crucial infrastructure for the maintenance of vital societal and economic functions. The approach to 5G network security is to be comprehensive and risk-based. 5G security is seen as a continuous process, which starts with the selection of the vendors and lasts the whole way through the production of the network elements and the lifetime of the operation of the networks. Non-technical factors should also be considered when a supplier's risk profile is drawn up and components critical for national security should be sourced from trustworthy parties only.

Background: This study investigated the end-users’ perceptions about the feasibility of deploying biometric authentication systems as intervention solutions to ameliorate card fraud in the South African payment card industry. Objectives: The objective of the study was to determine if the existing banking technology and telecommunications infrastructure were capable of supporting biometric payment systems. Method: In this qualitative research, interviews were conducted with 30 sample elements selected from commercial banks, telecommunications companies and other service providers. The sample included individuals working with banking back-end technologies, telecommunications service providers and credit card fraud experts. Results: The study established that banking technology and telecommunications infrastructure were capable of supporting biometric payment systems. It was revealed that the deployment of biometric systems would mitigate card fraud transactions. However, findings showed that introduction of zero-floor limits led to high traffic volumes, creating congestion on the telecommunications connectivity. Thus, there was a high likelihood that transaction processes would be slow during peak periods. Conclusion: The implementation of biometric systems required highly skilled information technology personnel to oversee and support these technologies. This was identified as a potential hindrance for banks. The study established that existing banking and telecommunications infrastructure was capable and supported biometric systems. Banks were not keen to invest in an outright biometric environment because of the huge costs that would be incurred in implementing advanced technologies.

This paper proposes a white box method of predicting critical alarms so they can be mitigated and understood by engineers. Forecasting these alarms will avoid outages and maintain the agreed service level which is beneficial to both the provider of telecommunication services and the consumers. The paper evaluates several item set mining approaches on a set of alarms of the British Telecom (BT) national telecommunication network and proposes a novel transformation of the data to enable the discovery of patterns undetectable by current item set mining approaches. The result is a method for rule induction that predicts alarms with high precision using a wide range of features.

Large-scale natural disasters can have a profound effect on the telecommunication services in the affected geographical area. Hence, it is important to develop routing approaches that may help in circumventing damaged regional areas of a network. This prompted the development of geographically diverse routing schemes and also of disaster-risk aware routing schemes. A minimum-cost geodiverse routing, where a minimum geographical distance value D is imposed between any intermediate element of one path and any element of the other path, is presented. Next, the problem of the calculation of a D-geodiverse routing solution which ensures a certain level of availability is tackled. An algorithm is described that either obtains a solution to that problem or the most available path pair satisfying the desired geographical distance value D—this can be useful for the specification of availability levels in Service Level Agreements. Finally, a case study is presented, in an optical network, to determine the cost increase in terminal equipment (transponders) of approaches to ensure a much larger separation of the paths (of the selected path pair), with respect to minimal length link-disjoint routing.

Sometimes the service/network of telecommunications operators in Nigeria (MTN, Etisalat, Airtel, Glo etc.) are so poor that customers find it difficult to make calls. You will be making call and the call will be breaking, sometimes it will even cut. The Service Providers block people's lines/SIM Cards at their whims. They disturb customers with unsolicited texts messages, they activate caller tunez for customers without their consent and even charge them for it. You will send a text message and same will not be delivered but yet credit will be deducted for the transaction and many other issues. The work attempts examining what the law says about some of these issues by reference to decided cases and the position that our Courts have taken on these issues. Methods of enforcing the rights were also examined.

Customer retention is considered as one of the important concerns for many companies and financial institutions like banks, telecommunication service providers, investment ser-vices, insurance and retail sectors. Recent marketing indicators and metrics show that attracting and gaining new customers or subscribers is much more expensive and difficult than retaining existing ones. Therefore, losing a customer or a subscriber will negatively impact the growth and the profitability if the company. In this work, we propose a customer retention model based on one of the most powerful machine learning classifiers which is XGBoost. The latter classifier is experimented when combined wit different oversampling methods to improve its performance in the used imbalanced dataset. The experimental results show very promising results compared to other well-known classifiers.

The Indian telecommunication industry is all set for growth and is expected to contribute substantially towards the nation’s Gross Domestic Product. Industries and in particular the private players have to concentrate on service quality and customer loyalty to remain competitive. Vodafone-Idea, Airtel, Jio and BSNL currently share the market and competition has become intense with advent of Reliance Jio. Business development actions by leveraging the loyalty of customers are cost effective rather than running around a new customer. Kochi a global city, known as the trading capital of Kerala has been selected to carry research. The SERVQUAL model was adopted to understand customer’s opinion regarding the telecommunication service providers. 50 respondents were contacted by the researcher by way of convenient random sampling as descriptive research design was adopted. There is a tight competition among the telecom operators nowadays and maintaining service quality, Loyalty is a must to boost their number of customers and retain their customers. Hence, the researcher made an attempt to study impact of Service Quality on Customer Loyalty.

We investigate the process of competition on the market of telecommunication services between three firms: the leader, the challenger and the follower. In this work we construct a model of competition between three players in the form of a multistage hierarchical non-zero sum game and compare it with our previous model of competition between three players in the form of a multistage non-hierarchical non-zero sum game. Compared to previous model, a hierarchical component was introduced. As solution of the game we find a subgame perfect equilibrium. We illustrate and compare the results with an example for three companies working on the Saint-Petersburg telecommunications market with the same initial conditions as in the previous work.

The article considers the tendencies of the telecommunication services global market development. The index of dynamics of telecommunication services markets in the world and in Ukraine for the period 2015-2019 is calculated. Based on the analysis of dynamics of the Ukrainian telecommunication services market development in relation to world and regional values, the main tendencies are highlighted: steady growth of telecommunication incomes for the last 10 years; reduction of the volume of the fixed telephone market with the simultaneous growth of the mobile market; lag behind global and regional values as a percentage of public access to the Internet; low, incomparable with global and regional values, the level of development of the mobile broadband market. Problems of development of the Ukrainian market of telecommunication services are defined.

The paper is devoted to telecommunication services for digital railways. We discuss a transition from GSM-R to LTE-R and 5G technologies. As a practical use case, we target urban railways development in Moscow, Russia. According to the European Commission, digital railways development should create so-called connected railways by providing reliable connectivity for safe, efficient and attractive railways, enhancing customer experience. It should provide added value for customers, increased capacity by enhanced reliability, efficiency, and performance of railways. In this connection, we discuss the critical elements of 5G deployment and the practical steps to move from the current telecommunication services to 5G. As historical examples, we are considering the largest projects of the transformation of the telecommunications infrastructure. As basic examples for GSM-R transition and switch to digital railways, we discuss Moscow Central Ring and Moscow Central Diameters. The paper highlights several tasks for telecom providers in Russia. In particularly, it is the development of the GSM-R network architecture taking into account existing networks, including interaction with an intelligent network, as well as the need to upgrade existing networks.

The article analyses the of telecommunications techniques in the transformation of the Russian economy, focus on supporting this direction in the Russia’s development. Telecommunications techniques create new opportunities for the health sector. There is a positive experience of some developed countries in the world actively implementing telecommunication techniques in health care practice for the social effect, the provision of quality medical services to people in the remote country’s regions, the transfer of the medical experience to the staff and also the increase of the medical care systems economic efficiency. In Russia also there are initiatives for the health system digitalization and the modern telecommunications techniques use. However, there are some difficulties and obstacles in the implementation, confirmed by expert opinions. It is important for the study of the role of telecommunications, information and communication techniques in the health care development at the present stage, the increase of medical care quality and the industry efficiency to evaluate the professional community’s perception of the healthcare digitalization; the foreign experience of the telecommunications techniques use in the health care development according to their economic efficiency; current prospects for the modern telecommunications techniques introduction taking into account the foreign experience. The foreign experience in patients’ remote diagnostics and medical professionals training, as well as regular evaluation of the processes economic efficiency, can and should be actively implemented in Russia’s practice. Such trends have been fully manifested only in Moscow, Moscow region, Saint-Petersburg, and Tatarstan. Other territories are significantly behind in providing telecommunications services to the healthcare sector. In Russia, the medical professional community realizes the importance of the health care digitalization, authorities supported and fixed the digitalization use at the institutional level, and the obstacles must be overcome on the basis of the expert community opinion and the international experience.

Chapters 6 and 7 have presented the impact of multi-hop traffic on throughput in a network of arbitrary topology. This chapter presents general considerations for pricing telecommunication network services. Pricing consideration based on throughput or delay is considered in Chaps. 9 and 10.

Voice-based artificial intelligence (AI) systems have been deployed gradually to replace traditional interactive voice response (IVR) systems in call center customer service, but little evidence exists on how the implementation of AI systems impacts customer behavior, as well as AI systems’ effects on call center customer service performance. Leveraging the proprietary data from a natural field experiment, we examine how the introduction of voice-based AI affects call length, customers’ demand for human service, and customer complaints in the call center customer service of a large telecommunication service firm. We find that the implementation of the AI system significantly increases call length and decreases customer complaints. Although the AI-based service system presumably reduces users’ efforts to transfer to human agents, we do not find any significant increase in customers’ demand for human service. Furthermore, our results show interesting heterogeneity in the effectiveness of the AI-based service system. For simple service requests, the AI-based service system reduces customer complaints for both experienced and inexperienced customers. For relatively complex quests, customers learn from prior experience of interacting with the AI system, and this learning effect leads to fewer complaints. Moreover, the AI-based system exerts a significantly larger effect on reducing customer complaints for older and female customers, as well as for customers who are experienced in using the IVR system. Finally, in examining details in customer-AI conversations, we find that speech-recognition failures in customer-AI interactions result in an increase in customers’ demand for human service and customer complaints.

In the twenty-first century, vast improvements in the quality and availability of telecommunication services have improved our lives beyond what we could have imagined just 50 years ago. We communicate, work, and can purchase almost anything we desire. Medicine has kept pace with these improvements; patients can now access their health records, order prescriptions, and access websites providing medical information.

Jelenleg dramai modon valtozo digitalizalodo tarsadalomban elunk, ahol minden es mindenki valtozason esik at. A telekommunikacios szolgaltatasok piaca rohamosan fejlődik. Hogyan reagaljon a telekommunikacios inkumbens iparag a digitalis kihivasok altal okozott versenyre, amelynek elterjedese csokkenti a beveteleket es a profitot? Milyen marketing eszkozoket vessen be a felhasznaloi szokasokkal es kapcsolat-tartasi elvarasaival valo lepestartas erdekeben. A HOT Telecom, Izrael telekommunikacios szolgaltatasi piacanak meghatarozo szereplője. Piaci helyzetenek megőrzese erdekeben a vallalat kulonfele marketing strategiakat alkalmaz. Jelen esettanulmanyban tukroződnek – a digitalis kihivasokra valo valaszkent - ezen marketing strategiai elemek alkalmazasa, valamint azok kihatasa es eredmenyessege. Currently, we live in a dramatically changing, digitalizing society, where everything and everyone is going through changes. The telecommunication services market is developing rapidly. How should the incumbent telecommunications industry respond to the competition created by digital challenges that are driving down revenue and margins? What marketing tools have to use to keep up with user habits and communication expectations? HOT Telecom - is a major player in the Israeli telecommunications market. To maintain its market position, the company employs various marketing strategies. The present case study reflects, in response to digital challenges, the application of these marketing strategic elements, their impact, and effectiveness.

The article examines the problem of outflow of customers of telecommunications companies: foreign and Ukrainian. It is determined that it is appropriate for companies to use information systems that will predict the behavior of users of services, and will warn the company in the presence of risks. It is established that foreign companies are more progressive in research and customer retention. In Ukrainian companies, unstructured data research tools are outdated. In order to expand the tools of Ukrainian companies, the achievements of foreign scientists have been studied. When processing a large amount of information in order to build short- and medium-term forecasts of consumer behavior, it is appropriate to build models of user behavior and use machine learning methods. It is established that scientists prefer the method of random forest. The methods of machine learning are analyzed in the work: their advantages and disadvantages are determined. The characteristics of the random forest method are investigated. It is established that further improvements in this area may be compositions of algorithms. The method of composition of algorithms — boosting is investigated. Its advantages and disadvantages are established, features of this method are defined. The stages of building a model for creating a forecast are defined. Based on the analyzed literature on the outflow of users, proposals have been identified that can reduce the reduction in their number. The priority directions of further researches concerning optimization problems of methods of machine learning, in particular in the conditions of uncertain factors are established.

Fast population growth in cities and surrounding regions force cities to become smarter to have a sustainable economy, social quality, and environmental well-being. Smart-Cities will be the ones using information and communication technologies to make cities services more efficient (in performance and cost), interactive, and aware of events. For a city to become smarter, it needs to make use of emerging technologies related with Internet-of-Things (IoT), not only to collect information and interact (actuate, command, control) but also to provide services for analytics and other applications. In this paper, is researched the concept of smart-city in the context of the project CityAction, tested on the city of Castelo Branco, Portugal. This project focuses on the relationship between IoT, monitoring, actuating and displaying data. Based on collected data from sensors spread across the city, the proposed project aims to make “smart” decisions to optimize resources, cost, well living, and environmental impact. Results introduce an architecture to integrate multiple heterogeneous sensors, develop a dashboard able of displaying data in a user-friendly way, and making this information available to population and users through a mobile app. This mechanism makes possible to infer better decisions on the city management/behavior and put in place the needed mechanisms to improve response time, safety and well living. info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

The telecommunication services rely on transmission of electromagnetic waves, increasing strength of electromagnetic field (EMF) in the environment, as well as corresponding human exposure to EMF. Thus, such inevitable exposure and their potentially unhealthy effects have been in focus of the general population concerns, requesting and initiating development of systems for daily and continuous EMF monitoring, such is the recently launched, the Serbian EMF RATEL system. This system has been established on spatially distributed wireless monitoring stations/sensors, performing long-term EMF observation over the Republic of Serbia territory, in order to timely inform the Serbian public on present level of EMF and associated exposure. The EMF RATEL system, as the world newest monitoring system, brings a feature of monitoring the EMF contribution from telecommunication services, in several predefined frequency sub-bands. Such service-based monitoring approach, some technical details and analysis/dissemination of measurement results will be presented in this paper, in order to highlight capability of EMF RATEL in prevention, protection and management of EMFs, particularly in the Republic of Serbia.

Telecommunications service is an important and growing market, with worldwide revenue exceeding $2.2 trillion in 2016. In the U.S. market, the total number of mobile wireless connections has grown from 279.6 million in 2008 to 396 million in 2016. All the firms in this market offer consumers an option of purchasing either an individual plan or a family plan. Whereas a menu of individual plans can be thought of as a means to segment the market, the theoretical challenge is to understand how a firm stands to benefit from adding family plans to its product mix. In this paper, we use a game-theoretic framework to explore the role of family plans. Interestingly, we find that even when a family plan does not draw in any new consumers, a firm can still benefit from offering these plans. This occurs primarily because a family plan enables the firm to price discriminate more effectively. In particular, because some consumers can bundle themselves and join a family plan, the firm is able to charge a higher price to single high-valuation consumers who are unable to be part of a family. Furthermore, the presence of a family plan can have a negative impact on the plan offered to single low-valuation consumers who now have to pay a higher overage price. We also show that not all family plans are profitable and that the profitability depends on the sizes of different types of families. The online appendices are available at https://doi.org/mksc.2018.1121 .

The purpose of the article is the study of the current state of the marketing environment of the telecommunications enterprise of Azerbaijan and the research of certain factors of the microenvironment, whose influence in recent years has changed significantly: consumers, competitors and a competitive environment; state regulation of the telecommunication services market and management of telecommunications enterprises. The article proposes a scheme of a competitive network model of the telecommunications services market in Azerbaijan. The article also compiled a diagram of the competitive network model of the telecommunications services market in Azerbaijan. The study of the model was carried out by calculating the Herfindahl-Hirschman index, which showed that the market of telecommunication services in Azerbaijan can be considered a potentially competitive market, the competitive environment is developing in the direction of free competition.

With the emergence of recent technologies in the field of computer network, traditional infrastructure in the field of networks have become obsolete and incompatible with respect to the new architectures of open networks that emerge with force. This is how software-defined networks emerge by enabling cloud computing ecosystem, enterprise data centers, and telecommunications service providers. The major contribution of this paper is the simulation of an ecosystem based on a software defined network by making use of certain types of networks topologies and using the virtualization of the open network operating system (ONOS) and Mininet as a network emulator.

We analyze the capabilities of the Colossus codebreaking devices, built in 1943–1945 under the direction of Tommy Flowers of the UK General Post Office. Colossus is often described as a programmable computer, a misconception we trace to old battles about the “first computer” and to former secrecy about its actual capabilities. In fact, Colossus was not called a computer at the time, and does not meet later definitions because it carried out no mathematical operation other than counting. Colossus automatically executed a program, i.e., performed series of discrete operations, but it was not programmable because that program could not be fundamentally modified by its users. Instead of the old focus on allocating “firsts,” we argue for new perspectives on Colossus focused on its use and impact, its relationship to other early machines, and its place in the history of digital communications engineering.

A B2B transaction is a transaction between organizations. However, the ripple effects of a B2B transaction can reach the members of the organization and generate additional economic impact. Enterprise LTE (Long term evolution) is a newly introduced B2B service in the South Korean telecommunications market. While it provides secure and fast telecommunications services to businesses, it can also affect the employees’ utility in the business, since the service provider can provide a variety of additional services to employees who use the same telecommunications provider for their mobile devices. In this study, we empirically analyze how B2B and Enterprise LTE services affect consumer churn-in in the telecommunications market. We estimate consumer benefit based on the additional services provided after the introduction of the B2B service using conjoint analysis. We also estimate consumer switching cost for changing one’s mobile telecommunications service provider using contingent valuation method. By comparing these values, we analyze the switching probability of employees when B2B services are introduced at their workplace. The results show that in order to maximize revenue, considering the revenue gained from new subscribers and from fees for providing additional services, lowering service fees for additional services and maximizing market share are advisable.

In this paper, a queueing system with multicast service, random resource requirements and general probability distributions of busy and idle periods is considered. Motivated by challenges from practical applications in the area of performance analysis of telecommunication systems, the model is built on the basis of well-known resource queueing systems theory. Two distinctive features of the model related to resource requirements are: the volume of a requirement, which is random with a given probability distribution function, and the resource requirements which overlap with each other. The first feature comes from the analysis of wireless networks, where the volume of resource depends on the location of the mobile equipment, type of telecommunication service, required data bitrate and radio signal path loss. The second feature relates to the multicast approach to data delivery in modern telecommunication networks. The stationary probability distribution of the number of customers in the system is derived. The main characteristics for the performance analysis of multicast telecommunication systems including the blocking probability, the mean number of customers in the system and the mean of the total amount of occupied resources are proposed. The analytical formulas for the performance calculations are obtained for the Frechet-type distribution of a requested resources volume.

The telecommunications industry is on the cusp of adopting a new generation of mobile technologies. This fifth generation (5G) promises far-reaching changes, with the high-speed wireless broadband that it provides changing the way that individuals and businesses use telecommunication services. Through 5G the quality of telecommunication services will improve, with better signals being received inside buildings and latency and jitter significantly reducing so that new services can be developed. These new services are often associated with vertical sectors such as the automotive industry, healthcare, logistics and energy. It is these vertical sectors that are the heart of the socio-economic benefits that many believe 5G will create. Moreover, 5G is central to the Internet of Things, where the massive amounts of data generated will facilitate productivity improvements as well as lead to entrepreneurial activity across the economy. Given the widespread socio-economic benefits associated with 5G, it is not surprising that policymakers are also interested in its development. If policymakers can position a country or region so that it gains an early lead in 5G and/or key vertical sectors, then it may be able to thrive in the highly competitive global market that is expected to emerge. Of course, as 5G roll-out plans in the majority of countries are still being defined and services have not been launched, the challenges for policymakers are significant. The wrong decisions may be made, and the country or region does not prosper as much as it could have done if a different course of action had been taken. Moreover, the decisions taken by policymakers may result in digital divides emerging. The impact of 5G is far-reaching. It will impact on the telecommunications industry, not only in terms of how 5G services are rolled-out but also in terms of who provides services to customers. The emergence of 5G-enabled vertical sectors could fundamentally change telecommunication markets, forcing telecommunication companies in less lucrative roles than was previously the case. The innovative activity associated with vertical sectors may benefit many, but unless 5G networks are everywhere some will inevitable not benefit to the same extent. 5G, therefore, raises a number of issues that require further thought. The articles of this special issue, which were solicited through an open call for papers and peer reviewed, begin to address the complexity and dynamism of 5G and the wide-ranging socio-economic impact that its adoption and roll-out will have.

Consumers of telecommunication services become more and more aware and concerned of how their data is treated by providers. Both, the European General Data Protection Regulation and the versatility of new communication-related data use cases drive this challenge. The Data Cockpit Minimum Viable Product is an important step to generate more transparency for private telco customers. It is part of a new 360-degree customer view, which is generated to emphasize the user position in managing telco services and contracts of an entire household. Extensive user research has identified crucial steps to reach use case acceptance, respectively opt-in, by customers as well as key success factors behind building up users’ confidence and giving them more control over their data.

More businesses and organizations are choosing clouds to accommodate their workload, e.g., annalistic departments of enterprises use public/private cloud to deploy the analysis function of data, and telecommunication operators deploy Virtual Network Functions (NFVs) such as virtual Evolved Packet Core (vEPC) on clouds to provide telecommunication services. When utilizing the cloud, the cloud user is concerned about the functionality, reliability, performance, etc. of the cloud-based function, which we call the intent or the service requirements. However, to meet the intent, the user needs to tell the cloud resource orchestrator/controller what kinds of Virtual Machines (VMs) are needed and the amount of computing resources necessary to allocate to each VM, which we call resource requirements. In our preliminary work [1], we addressed this problem and proposed an Intent-Based Cloud Management (IBCM) framework to "translate" the cloud user's service requirements into resource requirements. In this work, we have focused on realizing a Resource Design Framework (RDF) for IBCM that decides the needed computing resource amount to fulfill the cloud user' intent/ service requirements. The main contributions of this work are as follows: (1) We have systematically analyzed factors that need to be taken into consideration when designing the resources. (2) On the basis of the analysis, we propose the architecture of RDF that is applicable for various cloud-based applications and scenarios. To the best of knowledge, this is the first work to address this issue. (3) We have validated the proposed RDF in an experimental cloud-based machine learning scenario. The experiment results show our RDF is able to infer the performance and operation state with over 90% precision, thus enabling resources to be precisely designed in accordance with performance requirements and operation policy. (4) In addition to precise resource design, we also proposed a service level agreement (SLA) violation prevention mechanism for RDF and verified its effectiveness.

Customer contentment plays an essential (if not the most important) role for the continuation and development of business relations. In this context, the functioning of goods and services acts as the crucial influencing factor. In the case of services, their providers willingly deploy CMSs (Condition Monitoring Systems) for the continuous CM (Condition Monitoring) of the service availability by means of various KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). A CMS must red-flag an abnormal condition. This happens if the recent value(s) of a KPI exceed(s) a predetermined threshold for a certain period. The pertinent literature contains a multiplicity of ways for automatic threshold computation, including a particular one for telecommunication services with time-varying load characteristic. Regrettably, the latter lacks in (distribution-independent) outlier extinction. Thus, this scholarly piece bridges this gap by applying an outlier detection algorithm based upon Walsh's nonparametric tests to a KPI history, removing the identified outliers, and comparing Pukelsheim's three sigma rule and the minimum or maximum value of the outlier-free array for threshold evaluation. The result of a corresponding field test assesses the reliability of the suggested methodology.

Using data for 16 major states in India from 2001 to 2015, this paper examines the patterns, distribution dynamics, and the drivers of telecommunications (telecom) services across different states. We apply both parametric and nonparametric econometric techniques to study the distribution dynamics of telecom services across the states. Further, we employ the generalised method of moment (GMM) to examine the determinants of telecommunications services in India. Our results indicate that the interstate gap in telecommunications services has been declining over time and there is a tendency for convergence in teledensity towards the national average. The regression analysis suggests that per capita income and network externality are significant determinants of teledensity across states in India. Furthermore, literacy rate and relative size of the service sector are independently significant predictors of teledensity. If we consider rural and urban areas separately, there are some important differences. For example, while the interstate gaps in telecom services in rural areas seem to have declined, there is little evidence of such a tendency in urban areas. However, the regression results with respect to the importance of per capita income and network externality for telecom services are robust to the rural-urban divide and to the inclusion of additional explanatory variables. The findings of this study have important policy implications.

The world is travelling in information era where information is the essential element for every individual, institution, society and country. Communication of information is done by every individual to perform their daily activities, so the mobile telecommunication service has become a basic need where everybody needs telecommunication services. From the latest MIS Report of Nepal Telecommunication Authority (NTA), Market Penetration Rate (MPR) for mobile service 134.41%, which clearly indicates that the number of mobile service users has surpassed the population, and this actually means, at least mathematically , that there are no more people who aren’t using a mobile service in the market. This also means that there are no new customers for mobile service as they must be a new customer to us churning out from some other mobile service provider. Additionally, the data of MPR above 100% means the mobile market has reached the saturation level. When a market becomes highly saturated it’s not only hard to find a new customer, but also costly to get a new customer. Now, the main focus of every company is about retention of customers. Customer retention will be more and more crucial for survival of the company in the mobile telecommunication sector in upcoming days. There are different factors of influence of a customer retention like price, service quality, promotion mix, innovation and customer care. This study will analyze the implementation of the factors of customer retention by Nepal Telecom.Int. J. Soc. Sc. Manage. Vol. 5, Issue-3: 89-97

Reversing a two-decade deregulatory trend of telecommunications services, in 2010 U.S. regulators embarked on an aggressive regulatory agenda including, but not limited to, the regulation of high-speed Internet services under the auspices of net neutrality using utility-style regulations codified in the 1930s. Firms, regulators, and analysts feared a reduction in capital spending, contradicting established policy goals of expanding Internet availability and adoption. In this article, a difference-in-differences regression model augmented with randomization inference is applied to government data on capital spending in telecommunications. Large negative effects on investment are found. The estimated effects are robust across changes in estimation periods and model specifications, and multiple tests of the model’s assumptions lend credibility to the findings.

El isomorfismo mimético según DiMaggio & Powell (1983) ocurre en campos organizacionales en donde el esfuerzo racional de cada empresa por contrarrestar la incertidumbre, conduce a una homogeneidad entre organizaciones; lo cual se supondría que ocurre en el sector telecomunicaciones a nivel mundial. Para comprobar esta hipótesis, este artículo presenta un modelo de panel de datos desbalanceado que tiene como propósito determinar las diferencias existentes en la prestación de servicios de telecomunicaciones para 69 países. El periodo considerado para el estudio correspondió al quinquenio 2010 – 2015. Los hallazgos principales sugieren la existencia de diferencias en la prestación de los servicios entre países, que no solo se explican por la tecnología, sino que involucran la incidencia de instituciones informales. Se concluye que no existe aún isomorfismo a nivel de los países analizados.

As competition grows in the telecommunication service industry, understanding the origins of brand image and consumer behavioral intentions challenges practitioners to design an effective marketing strategy and branding plan. In this paper, brand image and behavioral relationships are investigated i...

How will bounded rationality influence telecommunication network fluctuations? Recently, there has been an increased research interest in telecommunication network pricing, which leads to many proposals for new pricing schemes motivated by different objectives namely: to maximize service provider’s revenue, to guarantee fairness among users and to satisfy quality of service (QoS) requirements for differentiated network services. In the present paper, we consider a system with N rational service providers (SPs) that offer homogeneous telecommunication services to bounded rational costumers. All SPs offer the same services and seek to persuade more customers in the same system, we model this conflict as a noncooperative game. On the one hand, each SP decide his policies of price and QoS in order to maximize his profit. One the other hand, we assume that the customers are boundedly rational and make their subscription decisions probabilistically, according to Luce choice probabilities. Furthermore, the customers decide to which SP to subscribe, each one may migrate to another SP or alternatively switch to “no subscription state” depending on the observed price/QoS. In this work, we have proved through a detailed analysis the existence and uniqueness of Nash equilibrium. We evaluate the impact of user’s bounded rationality on the equilibrium of game. Using the price of anarchy, we examine the performance and efficiency of equilibrium. We have shown that the SPs have an interest in confusing customers, which means more than the customers are irrational, the SPs earn more.

We estimate a two-step control-function model that relates incumbent prices for small-business telecommunications services to the number of facilities-based entrants, cost, demand, regulatory conditions, and a correction for endogenous market structure. Results show that the price effects from entry are understated in ordinary least squares regressions. When controlling for endogeneity, prices are negatively related to the number of entrants, indicating that markets without a competitive presence could exhibit market power. These findings should prove helpful to the Federal Communications Commission and other State regulators determining the conditions under which price and other forms of regulation may be relaxed.

We develop a model of dyad calling behavior as the outcome of asymmetric power between the initiating and receiving callers and the strength of their tie. Using a unique mobile phone service dataset, we estimate the model which encapsulates the evolving relationship between pairs of callers. We find that, first, the initiating callers enjoy more power than the receiving callers in determining the call volume. Second, the call volume between a pair of callers increases with the number of their common contacts. Finally, the reciprocity effect is prevalent in mobile phone service consumption. We discuss and demonstrate the implications of our results on firms' telecommunication service pricing decisions.

According to the Ministry of Information and Communications in Vietnam, as of November 2015, the number of mobile subscribers is over 120 million ones, accounting for over 86% of the total number of telephone subscribers. With a total population of over 92 million Vietnam citizens, a stable national economy and a large populations of young consumers in the country, mobile communication industries still have a huge potentials for future development. Telecommunication service providers in Vietnam are facing fierce competition. Subscribers are expecting OTT (Over the Top) applications, good quality service and handset subsidy. This study investigated whether legal frameworks, OTT applications, quality of service and handset subsidy are important components of mobile telecommunication service in Vietnam. This study used quantitative method to distribute surveys to mobile subscribers. Findings found that all four factors significantly influence mobile business in Vietnam. Thus, telecommunication service providers in Vietnam must continuously innovate to enhance operational competitiveness, improve business efficiency, expand business scale, and improve its position in the market in order to ensure sustainable development. Moreover, Vietnamese government needs to develop a legal framework to help mobile telecommunication service providers enhance the common interests and benefits of the entire society.

The study examined ‘Modelling brand loyalty in Nigerian telecommunication Industry’. It sought to ascertain the retention capacity of major and other telecommunication service firms in Nigeria usin...

Tatiana K. Bogdanova - Associate Professor, Department of Business Analytics, National Research University Higher School of EconomicsAddress: 20, Myasnitskaya Street, Moscow, 101000, Russian FederationE-mail: tanbog@hse.ruDmitry Y. Neklyudov - Data Analyst, Department of Big Data, StandardProject Ltd.; Senior Lecturer, Department of Business Analytics, National Research University Higher School of EconomicsAddress: 20, Myasnitskaya Street, Moscow, 101000, Russian FederationE-mail: dyuneklyudov@hse.ruOlga M. Uvarova - Leading Expert, Laboratory of Enterprise Competitiveness Problems Analysis, Senior Lecturer, Department of Business Analytics, National Research University Higher School of EconomicsAddress: 20, Myasnitskaya Street, Moscow, 101000, Russian FederationE-mail: ouvarova@hse.ru The market of telecommunications services is one of the most important and promising sectors of Russian economics, and its evolution has an essential impact on development strategies of all industries. In recent times, we observe a tendency for the operators’ business to shift from providing communications services to supplying integrated ICT services. A positive trend line of market growth is predicted for the coming five years. However, the problem of keeping and even expanding the subscriber base is an ongoing task of all telecom companies. One of the possible solutions to this problem is developing a rational tariff policy, which may take into consideration not only the interests of the company and its investors, but also the subscribers’ preferences. One of the main components of the tariff policy is developing new tariff plans, which meet the afore-mentioned requirements. In the paper, a new concept of tariff plan development is proposed. It is based on identifying stable groups of existing tariff plans and subscribers’ preferences that are non-linearly related with tariff plan characteristics. The proposed method is based on the concept of client lifetime value (CLV) that characterizes discounted profit received from a customer during all the time he consumes services from the company. This approach gives us an opportunity to build-up a CLV forming model, relying on subscriber’s consumption of mobile services and price characteristics of tariff plans. This seems quite important in the conditions of volatility of the high tech market and intensive changes in patterns of subscribers’ consumption of services. Within the proposed concept, an info-logical model for developing and evaluating a new tariff plan is developed. The model is based on the synthesis of neural networks and genetic algorithm. The proposed model allows us to make assessment of combinations of tariff plans’ price characteristics created by telecom company specialists, and to determine an optimal combination representing local or global maximum of CLV in the given time interval. This may be done for each subscriber’s consumption profile and for the given period. The approach gives us an opportunity to choose a tariff plan (from existing and newly created tariffs) for every subscriber cluster, which satisfies subscribers and investor preferences while providing maximum company profit.

The increased economic importance of digital services has profoundly changed the power structure in telecommunications and media markets. Although these services sometimes directly compete with traditional telecommunications services, the regulatory obligations for both players differ significantly. This article discusses three important areas deemed relevant in order to define a coherent regulatory framework and to account for the specific peculiarities of digital markets: First, challenges associated with assessing market power in digital markets. Second, challenges in harmonizing different regulatory obligations for digital services, and third, the vital role of data and data protection in the context of data-driven business models.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the mediation effect of customer satisfaction in the relationship between service quality, service orientation, and marketing mix strategy to customer loyalty, in a study in Telkomsel-Indonesia. The product used in this research will take the telecommunication service product categories with a number of products available in the market. In this research, the telecommunication service products of Telkomsel with various features as the research objects were studied. Design/methodology/approach The population of this research is Telkomsel customers who use the products of Halo, As and Simpati, domiciled in Malang, 2016. Since it was impossible to get the exact number of customers, the population in this study is infinite. The study had a sample size of 200 respondents. This research uses the structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis techniques along with AMOS methods. Findings The quality of service, service orientation, and strategy marketing mix applied by the company are not all variables can directly affect customer loyalty, but must first going through satisfaction. Which means that companies must first need to understand what the customer needs through variable service quality, service orientation, and marketing mix strategy so that the customers feel loyal when the level of satisfaction is resolved. The service quality provided by the telecommunications industry needs to be improved in order to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty of telecommunications services, especially for Telkomsel in Malang. Originality/value Originality for this paper shows: mediation effect (using the Sobel test) customer satisfaction on the effect of service quality, service orientation and marketing mix strategy to customer loyalty; location of the study (no previous research for this relationship): telecommunication services in Malang, Indonesia.

The study has been undertaken with following aims; first, to establish the plausibility of a positive relationship between service innovation and corporate reputation and their effect together on cross-buying intention of customers of telecommunication industry in India. Second, empirically examine the mediating and moderating effect of corporate reputation between service innovation and cross-buying intention. The descriptive approach was applied and tested by adopting a survey method where the sample units comprised of customers from various telecommunication service providers. Convenience sampling method was used based on which 256 customers of major service providers in southern part of India were approached for their opinion on the constructs. Smart—partial least square (hereinafter PLS) software tool was used to test the conceptual framework. On analyzing the result, it was observed that corporate reputation explained the relationship between service innovation and cross-buying intention; further corporate reputation also strengthens the effect of service innovation on cross-buying intention. The survey results indicate that decision makers/managers of telecommunication service firms need to understand that building reputation is one of the key aspects that would strengthen their initiatives of bringing service innovation frequently, as well as make their customers to cross-buy other services. The study fills the gap by analyzing the combined effect of service innovation and corporate reputation and cross-buying intention. Further, the study estimates the mediating and the moderating effect of corporate reputation between service innovation and cross-buying intention in telecommunication service settings which was not attempted earlier.

In this data article, the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for Quality of Service (QoS) of Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) networks in Nigeria are provided and analyzed. The data provided in this paper contain the Call Setup Success Rate (CSSR), Drop Call Rate (DCR), Stand-alone Dedicated Channel (SDCCH) congestion, and Traffic Channel (TCH) congestion for the four GSM network operators in Nigeria (Airtel, Etisalat, Glo, and MTN). These comprehensive data were obtained from the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC). Significant differences in each of the KPIs for the four quarters of each year were presented based on Analysis of Variance (ANOVA). The values of the KPIs were plotted against the months of the year for better visualization and understanding of data trends across the four quarters. Multiple comparisons of the mean-quarterly differences of the KPIs were also presented using Tukey's Post Hoc test. Public availability and further interpretation and discussion of these useful information will assist the network providers, Nigerian government, local and international regulatory bodies, policy makers, and other stakeholders in ensuring access of people, machines, and things to high quality telecommunications services. Keywords: Quality of service, GSM networks, Call setup success rate, Drop call rate, Stand-alone dedicated channel congestion, Traffic channel congestion

OAPA Network function virtualization (NFV) is a promising technique aimed at reducing capital expenditures (CAPEX) and operating expenditures (OPEX), and improving the flexibility and scalability of an entire network. In contrast to traditional dispatching, NFV can separate network functions from proprietary infrastructure and gather these functions into a resource pool that can efficiently modify and adjust service function chains (SFCs). However, this emerging technique has some challenges. A major problem is reliability, which involves ensuring the availability of deployed SFCs, namely, the probability of successfully chaining a series of virtual network functions (VNFs) while considering both the feasibility and the specific requirements of clients, because the substrate network remains vulnerable to earthquakes, floods and other natural disasters. Based on the premise of users & #x2019; demands for SFC requirements, we present an Ensure Reliability Cost Saving (ER & #x005F;CS) algorithm to reduce the CAPEX and OPEX of telecommunication service providers (TSPs) by reducing the reliability of the SFC deployments. The results of extensive experiments indicate that the proposed algorithms perform efficiently in terms of the blocking ratio, resource consumption, time consumption and the first block.

This research establishes an indirect link between the liberalization of telecommunications services and labor productivity based on the causal chain following Francois (2002) and Wang (2006). Estimates are based on Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) countries data for the period of 2002-2012. The results show that the degree of competition has a significant effect on the performance of telecom services, which in turn significantly affects the labor productivity. There is no correlation between the openness of telecom services and the degree of competition. As policy implication, on the basis of our results, the regulation in the telecommunications sector needs to be strengthened in order to reduce operators' monopoly power. Thus, we will witness a great penetration of telecommunications services in the ECOWAS countries. In doing so the goal of universal service access would be achieved and the productivity of the work factor will improve accelerating economic growth.