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It has become common for governments and practitioners to measure mobility using data from smartphones, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet in countries where few people have smartphones, or use mobile internet, the movement of smartphones may not be a good indicator of the movement of the population. This paper develops a framework for approaching potential bias that can arise when measuring mobility with smartphones. Using mobile phone operator records in Uganda, we compare the mobility of smartphones and the basic and feature phones that are more common. Smartphones have different travel patterns, and decrease mobility substantially more in response to a COVID-19 lockdown. This suggests caution when interpreting smartphone mobility estimates in contexts with low adoption.

Brand is a very important intangible asset for organization. In this paper nominal values of Syrian mobile phone operators' brands were measured by using Conjoint Analysis technique depending on the preference of Syrians people which introduce good data measurements for mobile operators in Syria in order to prepare good Brand strategic plans. Many techniques were used to measure the nominal value of brand name mathematically. Conjoint analysis is one of many techniques that has been widely used to evaluate consumer preference in marketing researches for hypothetical product and services.

This paper analyses the response to the COVID-19 pandemic of inbound tourism to Italy looking at variation across countries and across provinces. To this end, it uses weekly data on the number of foreign visitors in Italy from January 2019 until February 2021, as provided by a primary mobile phone operator. We document a very robust negative relation at province level between local epidemiological conditions and the inflow of foreign travellers. Moreover, provinces with a historically higher share of art tourism, and those that used to be ‘hotel intensive’ were hit the most during the pandemic, while provinces with a more prevalent orientation towards business tourism proved to be more resilient. Entry restrictions with varying degrees of strictness played a key role in explaining cross-country patterns. After controlling for these restrictions, we observed that the travellers that could arrive by their own, private, means of transportation decreased proportionally less. Overall, this evidence emphasises that contagion risk considerations played a significant role in shaping international tourism patterns during the pandemic.

Parks and other green spaces are an important part of sustainable, healthy and socially equal urban environment. Urban planning and green space management benefit from information about green space use and values, but such data are often scarce and laborious to collect. Temporally dynamic geographic information generated by different mobile devices and social media platforms are a promising source of data for studying green spaces. User-generated data have, however, platform specific characteristics that limit their potential use. In this article, we compare the ability of different user-generated data sets to provide information on where, when and how people use and value urban green spaces. We compare four types of data: social media, sports tracking, mobile phone operator and public participation geographic information systems (PPGIS) data in a case study from Helsinki, Finland. Our results show that user-generated geographic information sources provide useful insights about being in, moving through and perceiving urban green spaces, as long as evident limitations and sample biases are acknowledged. Social media data highlight patterns of leisure time activities and allow further content analysis. Sports tracking data and mobile phone data capture green space use at different times of the day, including commuting through the parks. PPGIS studies allow asking specific questions from active participants, but might be limited in spatial and temporal extent. Combining information from multiple user-generated data sets complements traditional data sources and provides a more comprehensive understanding of green space use and preferences.

Kenya being a leading mobile phone operator in Africa provides a suitable platform of understanding security weaknesses in relation to terrorism and financial frauds perpetrated through mobile phone technology. According to [5]; origin and use of mobile money transfer make the country a suitable case that can be replicated elsewhere in the world. It is worth noting that growth of mobile money transfer has promoted business alongside creating new employment opportunities in Kenya. However the growth of mobile phone technology has had an equal share of problems; subsequently leading to challenges of financial frauds, and terrorism activities. This paper addresses a mechanism of safe mobile phone technology through enhanced biometrics during financial transactions, SIM registration, and forensic audit trail in case of a crime.

Most humans today have mobile phones. According to the GSMA, there are almost 10 billion mobile connections in the world every day. These devices automatically capture behavioral data from human society and store it in databases around the world. However, data capture has several challenges to deal with, especially if it comes from old sources. Obsolete technologies such as 2G and 3G represent two-thirds of the total devices. To the best of our knowledge, all previous work only eliminates obvious problems in the data or use well-curated data. Eliminating traces in a time series can lead to deviations and biases in further analyses, especially when we are studying small areas or groups of peoples in the city. In this work, we present two algorithms to solve the problem of the Neighboring Network Hit (NNH) and calculate the distributions of trips and traveled distances with greater precision in small areas or groups of peoples. The problem of NNH arises when a mobile device connects to cellular sites other than those defined in the network design, which complicates the analysis of space-time mobility. We use cellular device data from three cities in Chile, obtained from the mobile phone operator and duly anonymized. We compare our results with the Government’s Origin and Destination Surveys and use a novel method to generate synthetic data to which errors are added in a controlled manner to evaluate the performance of our solution. We conclude that our algorithms improve results compared to naive methods, increasing the accuracy in the count of trips and, mainly, in the distance distributions.

In order to manage taxi operation more efficiently, a taxi management system based on NIOS II is proposed.The system includes a vehicle terminal with Nios II processor embedded in the FPGA, a background data management system of taxi management system and a mobile phone operator. The vehicle terminal receives navigation messages with low-power UM220-III Beidou/GPS dual-mode positioning module, completes the information processing of navigation messages by using the designated interrupt processing function of NIOS II, sends AT instructions to SIM900A module through serial port, and transmits vehicle location information and some necessary information to the network server using UDP protocol. The network server aggregates the taxi information of the whole city to form the available information. Managers operate background data management system to send dispatching information of taxis. The mobile operator receives dispatching information, and the taxi driver carries out the operation according to the dispatching information.

Web service logging is required within an organization to record inbound and outbound messages that are passed through a web service for the purpose of checking of data security violation, checking of data integrity, and supporting computer-related legal investigation. The inbound and outbound messages of a web service usually contain personal information or are sensitive records of service use which need privacy control. This paper proposes a framework to facilitate privacy-aware web service logging. The framework supports the ICT standard team of an organization to standardize the names and types of data which are to be used to define the input and output data elements of a web service. Based on the standardized data elements, the ICT standard team and a system analyst use a privacy policy language of the framework to define a privacy policy for logging web service input and output data elements. Also, the framework provides a logging web service that can be invoked by other web service to automatically log its inbound and outbound messages according to the privacy policy. In an experiment with web services of a mobile phone operator in Thailand, the use of this framework can facilitate web service development and can significantly decrease the percentage of web service audit rejects that are caused by lack of privacy protection in web service log files.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to detect different behavioral groups and the dominant patterns of customer shifts between segments of different values over time. Design/methodology/approach – A new hybrid methodology is presented based on clustering techniques and mining top-k and distinguishing sequential rules. This methodology is implemented on the data of 14,772 subscribers of a mobile phone operator in Tehran, the capital of Iran. The main data include the call detail records and event detail records data that was acquired from the IT department of this operator. Findings – Seven different behavioral groups of customer shifts were identified. These groups and the corresponding top-k rules represent the dominant patterns of customer behavior. The results also explain the relation of customer switching behavior and segment instability, which is an open problem. Practical implications – The findings can be helpful to improve marketing strategies and decision making and for prediction purposes. The obtained rules are relatively easy to interpret and use; this can strengthen the practicality of results. Originality/value – A new hybrid methodology is proposed that systematically extracts the dominant patterns of customer shifts. This paper also offers a new definition and framework for discovering distinguishing sequential rules. Comparing with Markov chain models, this study captures the customer switching behavior in different levels of value through interpretable sequential rules. This is the first study that uses sequential and distinguishing rules in this domain.

Exposure assessment is a crucial part in studying potential effects of RF-EMF. Using data from the HERMES study on adolescents, we developed an integrative exposure surrogate combining near-field and far-field RF-EMF exposure in a single brain and whole-body exposure measure. Contributions from far-field sources were modelled by propagation modelling and multivariable regression modelling using personal measurements. Contributions from near-field sources were assessed from both, questionnaires and mobile phone operator records. Mean cumulative brain and whole-body doses were 1559.7 mJ/kg and 339.9 mJ/kg per day, respectively. 98.4% of the brain dose originated from near-field sources, mainly from GSM mobile phone calls (93.1%) and from DECT phone calls (4.8%). Main contributors to the whole-body dose were GSM mobile phone calls (69.0%), use of computer, laptop and tablet connected to WLAN (12.2%) and data traffic on the mobile phone via WLAN (6.5%). The exposure from mobile phone base stations contributed 1.8% to the whole-body dose, while uplink exposure from other people’s mobile phones contributed 3.6%. In conclusion, the proposed approach is considered useful to combine near-field and far-field exposure to an integrative exposure surrogate for exposure assessment in epidemiologic studies. However, substantial uncertainties remain about exposure contributions from various near-field and far-field sources.

The advancement in mobile technologies and wireless communications has led to a rapidly growing number of users benefiting from mobile banking services. SMS banking offers a convenient mobile banking solution which is easy to implement and frequently used in many parts of the world. However, it is only viable under the assumption of secure SMS services. In this paper, a novel secure SMS banking protocol is proposed. The approach is based on a multi-channel security protocol combining low and high entropy steganography. One of the distinct advantages of this protocol is its confidentiality property against the mobile phone operator which, to our knowledge, is a novel feature. Furthermore, the required architecture is simple and only involves GSM services and one additional internet connection which can be insecure. As such it offers security, low deployment costs and would be suitable for example in rural areas or countries without individual secure home internet connections.

This chapter explores why corporations would be interested in development by looking at examples from a number of emerging market economies. Most of the studies on sustainable development were carried out by a major corporation and then evaluated using the 3-M model. The chapter covers two interesting and specific developments—India's governmental Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) rules and a study of a surprising world leader in CSR from Africa (Kenya), the mobile phone operator Safaricom. A socio-economic development project should have at least three components—the 3-M approach to development: micro component, meso component, and macro component. The 3-M approach to project and programme formulation, monitoring of impact and evaluation was first developed in a country programme review of Sri Lanka for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in 1994. Bangladesh is active in corporate social investment (CSI) in four main areas, namely environment, education, health and hygiene, and socioeconomy.

Actualmente, las empresas tienen como objetivo ser singulares y diferenciarse en un mercado altamente competitivo. La comunicación con sus públicos es clave para la construcción de la imagen de empresa. El establecer una estrategia basada en los principios de coherencia, consistencia y con un enfoque claro puede servir de gran ayuda, tal como apuntan diferentes autores, tales como Trout, Sanz de la Tajada (1996), Kotler (2000), Ries (2002), Wilson & Gilligan (2007), o Porter (2012), entre muchos otros. En definitiva, la adecuada estrategia de comunicación es el ancla para obtener un posicionamiento comunicativo único y privilegiado. Tuenti, compañía que nació en 2006 como red social española, ha realizado una evolución singular hasta ser un operador de telefonía móvil virtual en la actualidad. Este cambio, convierte a la operadora en un objeto de estudio de interés en el ámbito académico-profesional. Razón por la que se presenta un análisis de los distintos materiales de comunicación externa entre los años 2012 al 2015. Finalmente, se reflexiona sobre los resultados.

Modern technologies not only provide a variety of communication modes, e.g., texting, cellphone conversation, and online instant messaging, but they also provide detailed electronic traces of these communications between individuals. These electronic traces indicate that the interactions occur in temporal bursts. Here, we study the inter-call durations of the 100,000 most-active cellphone users of a Chinese mobile phone operator. We confirm that the inter-call durations follow a power-law distribution with an exponential cutoff at the population level but find differences when focusing on individual users. We apply statistical tests at the individual level and find that the inter-call durations follow a power-law distribution for only 3460 individuals (3.46%). The inter-call durations for the majority (73.34%) follow a Weibull distribution. We quantify individual users using three measures: out-degree, percentage of outgoing calls, and communication diversity. We find that the cellphone users with a power-law duration distribution fall into three anomalous clusters: robot-based callers, telecom frauds, and telephone sales. This information is of interest to both academics and practitioners, mobile telecom operator in particular. In contrast, the individual users with a Weibull duration distribution form the fourth cluster of ordinary cellphone users. We also discover more information about the calling patterns of these four clusters, e.g., the probability that a user will call the $c_r$-th most contact and the probability distribution of burst sizes. Our findings may enable a more detailed analysis of the huge body of data contained in the logs of massive users., Comment: 7 pages and 8 figues

In recent years, the adoption of mobile phones has been exceptionally rapid in many part of the world, and especially in India where cellular phones are nowadays almost as common as wrist watches. While mobile phone usage is rather an unexamined genre in academic literature, this study attempts to investigate consumer purchasing motives in cellular phone markets. This paper surveyed 190 consumers and look at their motives to purchase new mobile phones on one hand and factors affecting operator choice on the other. The result indicate that while price and properties were the most influential fac- tors affecting the purchase of a new mobile phone, price , audibility and friends' operator were regarded as the most important in the choice of the mobile phone operator. This paper concludes with a discussion of contributions and proposes ideas for future studies in this area.

Subject area Corporate social responsibility (CSR), marketing/branding, strategic management. Study level/applicability The case can be used in master, MBA and executive programs in courses on the following topics: CSR; strategic management; or strategic marketing. Case overview The case describes the CSR initiatives at the Slovenian mobile phone operator Si.mobil d.d., with the two pillars of taking care of employees and taking care of the environment. The main protagonists describe the process of initiating, developing and communicating the initiative, as well as the individual actions taken. In a strategy meeting, Si.mobil's top management set out to discuss the strategic challenges that the company was facing, trying to find ways out of the potentially deadly price war and commoditization spiral. Specifically, the discussion in the management meeting revolved around how Si.mobil can position itself in the market, how it can find a sustainable USP and whether and if yes, how the company's CSR initiatives can play a significant role therein. Expected learning outcomes To foster critical thinking about the reasons for and effectiveness of CSR initiatives; to be able to assess the role that CSR initiatives can play in brand building and differentiation; to understand how CSR affects company performance through its effect on and feedback reactions from different stakeholder groups; to critically discuss the preconditions for effective CSR initiatives, and to see exemplarily how they can be initiated and managed; to understand the crucial role that leadership and communication are playing in CSR initiatives; to identify the vital links between internally oriented (employee-focused) and externally oriented (societal-focus) CSR strategies and actions. Supplementary materials Teaching note

The aim of this cross-sectional study was to investigate the association between exposure to various sources of radiofrequency electromagnetic fields (RF EMFs) in the everyday environment and sleep quality, which is a common public health concern. We assessed self-reported sleep disturbances and daytime sleepiness in a random population sample of 1,375 inhabitants from the area of Basel, Switzerland. Exposure to environmental far-field RF EMFs was predicted for each individual using a prediction model that had been developed and validated previously. Self-reported cordless and mobile phone use as well as objective mobile phone operator data for the previous 6 months were also considered in the analyses. In multivariable regression models, adjusted for relevant confounders, no associations between environmental far-field RF EMF exposure and sleep disturbances or excessive daytime sleepiness were observed. The 10% most exposed participants had an estimated risk for sleep disturbances of 1.11 (95% CI: 0.50 to 2.44) and for excessive daytime sleepiness of 0.58 (95% CI: 0.31 to 1.05). Neither mobile phone use nor cordless phone use was associated with decreased sleep quality. The results of this large cross-sectional study did not indicate an impairment of subjective sleep quality due to exposure from various sources of RF EMFs in everyday life.

Does the distribution of Rome's population follow routine hourly, daily, or weekly patterns? And if it does, how do such patterns vary in different parts of the city? This paper reports on our investigation of the aggregate patterns of urban mobility in Rome, Italy for which we used novel data from a mobile phone operator. Unlike research that chartered urban mobility through individual travel surveys, our research determined the aggregate distribution of Rome's population over time by using the volume of call activity in mobile network cells as the unit of spatial analysis. In this paper, we first illustrate and confirm that there is significant regularity in urban mobility at different hours, days, and weeks. We then show how mobility between network cells differs at various times, and we account for the differences by using demographic, economic, and (built) environment indicators.

Despite substantial interest in the potential for mobile money to positively impact the lives of the poor, little empirical evidence exists to substantiate these claims. In this paper, we present the results of a field experiment in Afghanistan that was designed to increase adoption of mobile money, and determine if such adoption led to measurable changes in the lives of the adopters. The specific intervention we evaluate is a mobile salary payment program, in which a random subset of individuals of a large firm were transitioned into receiving their regular salaries in mobile money rather than in cash. We separately analyze the impact of this transition on both the employer and the individual employees. For the employer, there were immediate and significant cost savings; in a dangerous physical environment, they were able to effectively shift the costs of managing their salary supply chain to the mobile phone operator. For individual employees, however, the results were more ambiguous. Individuals who were transitioned onto mobile salary payments were more likely to use mobile money, and there is evidence that these accounts were used to accumulate small balances that may be indicative of savings. However, we find little consistent evidence that mobile money had an immediate or significant impact on several key indicators of individual wealth or well-being. Taken together, these results suggest that while mobile salary payments may increase the efficiency and transparency of traditional systems, in the short run the benefits may be realized by those making the payments, rather than by those receiving them.

Introduction: The market is a very important place to study the behavior of consumers and also provide useful insights what a consumer requires in a product. Telecommunication revolution has indeed swept the country and the future looks even more prospective. Since the Indian mobile phone operator market is overcrowded, customers have many choices of mobile phone operator.Research Methodology: A sample of 300 was taken from North India. The term North India refers to Seven North India States of Punjab, Jammu and Kashmir, Rajasthan, Delhi, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and the Union Territory of Chandigarh. Analysis was done with the help of SPSS 21. Statistical tools used are descriptive analysis, Correlations, Regression, Factor Analysis, T-Test.Finding: Study finds that various factors influence customer preference and satisfaction towards mobile service provider. Factors like Quality, Price, Promotion, affects customer satisfaction. Effect of these factors can be responsible for changing of current service providers. The study also helps us to know what are the major factors of dissatisfaction among the people after using a mobile operator.Originality: The research is original and studied an important topic of Consumer behavior towards network operators.

An innovating model to optimize the debts collection process for a mobile phone operator is developed. It is based on a markovian method to model the debts collection considering both the financial risk and the churn risk. This model addresses two key decisions in the debts collection process: the determination of the optimal cancellation date and the improvement of the invoicing policy. Moreover, a new indicator to measure the debts collection process performances is presented. This provides the process manager with a single figure describing rationally the economic reality. The model and the indicator have been implemented for a major French mobile operator.

This paper explores the role of network effects in the consumer’s choice of mobile phone operators in the UK. It contributes to the existing literature by taking a new approach to testing for direct network effects and by using individual-level data, which allows to analyse the impact that the immediate social network has on consumer choice in network markets. For our empirical analysis we use two sources of data: market-level data from the British telecommunications regulator OFCOM and micro-level data on consumers’ usage of mobile telephones from the survey, Home OnLine. We estimate two classes of models which illustrate the role of network effects. The first is an aggregate model of the comparative volume of on-net and off-net calls. This finds that the proportion of off-net calls falls as mobile operators charge a premium for off-net calls, but even in the absence of any price differential between on-net and off-net, there is still a form of pure network effect, where a disproportionate number of calls are on-net. The second is a model of the individual consumer’s choice of operator. This finds that individual choice shows considerable inertia, as expected, but is heavily influenced by the choices of others in the same household. There is some evidence that individual choice of operator is influenced by the total number of subscribers for each operator, but a much stronger effect is the operator choice of other household members.

A UK electricity distribution network operator (DNO) brought together a team of external consultants, internal IT resource, equipment suppliers, and a mobile phone operator to deliver an operational GPRS (general packet radio services) based telecontrol infrastructure capable of supporting over a thousand remotely controlled switches in the DNO's 11 kv distribution network.

This paper describes the use of relative operating characteristics (ROC) analysis for decision making under uncertain circumstances. It is presented in the framework of credit scoring for a mobile phone operator.

Advertising appeals to people in such a way that it affects their choices. Adver- tisers operate on the basis of different discourses that are both verbal and non- verbal. This article explores how contemporary discourses of advertising interpellate individuals as subjects. Furthermore, ideological work in the dis- courses, as Althusser has put it, are discussed on the basis of "voices" of adver- tisers. The theory is brought into practice in the analysis of the case studies: two of Mobitel's advertisements promoting the mobile phone. The semiotic- structuralist approach is used to discuss the denotative and connotative mean- ings of the advertisements and to point to the ideological nature of advertising and the discourses promising new identities and desired lifestyles. Advertisements are one of the most important cultural artifacts affecting life today. Even if one does not read newspapers or watch television, the images posted over our surroundings are inescapable, and advertisements have an immense influence. Their existence in several media gives advertisements a sort of independent reality that links them to our own life. As they appear con- stantly and thus share continuity, they form a world experienced as real. Advertisements provide a structure that transforms a language of objects to that of people and vice versa. Contemporary Slovene advertising is making that transformation through discourses and representational forms discussed in this article. We explore the advertisements of a new communication technology com- pany in Slovenia both because of the recent invention and rapid spread of mobile phoning in this country and because of the transparent introduction of new advertising techniques. It is the intention of this article to explore—using semiotic-structuralist analysis of the advertisements—how contemporary advertising discourses are practiced. Slovene national mobile phone operator Mobitel has created a systematic and organized advertising campaign that

The growing awareness that human communications and social interactions are assuming a stratified structure, due to the availability of multiple techno-communication channels, including online social networks, mobile phone calls, short messages (SMS) and e-mails, has recently led to the study of multidimensional networks. In this context we perform the first study of the multiplex mobile social network, gathered from the records of both call and text message activities of millions of users of a large mobile phone operator over a period of 12 weeks. While social networks constructed from mobile phone datasets have drawn great attention in recent years, so far studies have dealt with text message and call data, separately, providing a very partial view of people sociality expressed on phone. Here we analyze how the call and the text message dimensions overlap showing how many information about links and nodes could be lost only accounting for a single layer and how users adopt different media channels to interact with their neighborhood.

With the rapid developments of modern technologies in communications, short messages (SM) is becoming one of the most frequently used communication channels in the world. Based on the real SM communication records in Chinese mobile phone operator, we study the inter-event time distributions between two consecutive SMs, and find that the inter-event time distribution is heavy tailed and can be fitted by power-law distribution both in the group and individual levels. A monotonous relation between the activity and the power-law exponents is found in the individual level.

Monitoring and analyzing pedestrian traffic in and around retail stores has become an important tool for discovering underutilized operational and marketing opportunities of retail localities. Since a large proportion of pedestrians nowadays carry mobile phones, visual observation methods of the past could give way to cell-tower and WiFi based capture of passers-by, optionally augmented by aggregated or anonymized demographic data about them coming from their service providers. A major mobile phone operator recently announced the introduction of such a service in Germany, the U.K. and Brazil, but had to cancel its plans for Germany since the revelation caused nationwide privacy uproar.

Technological change drives innovation, which in turn drives economic growth. Sustained growth is a pre-requisite for wealth creation and social improvement. That has always been the case. But for any country managing the transition to a knowledge based economy, it is paramount. Such is the case in twenty-first century China. Building partnerships between major international creators of research and organisations which can take new innovations to market will be increasingly important to the knowledge based economy.

This publication deals with the applicational aspects and possibilities of the Complete Gradient Clustering Algorithm—the classic procedure of Fukunaga and Hostetler, prepared to a ready-to-use state, by providing a full set of procedures for defining all functions and the values of parameters. Moreover, it describes how a possible change in those values influences the number of clusters and the proportion between their numbers in dense and sparse areas of data elements. The possible uses of these properties were illustrated in practical tasks from bioinformatics (the categorization of grains for seed production), management (the design of a marketing support strategy for a mobile phone operator) and engineering (the synthesis of a fuzzy controller).

Analyzing communication flows on the network can help to improve the overall quality it provides to its users and allow the operators to detect abnormal patterns and react accordingly.In this paper we consider the analysis of large volumes of cellular communications records. We propose a method that detects abnormal communications events covering call data record volumes, comprising a country-level data set. We detect patterns by calculating a weighted average using a sliding window with a fixed period and correlate the results with actual events happening at that time. We are able to successfully detect several events using a data set provided by a mobile phone operator, and suggest examples of future usage of the outcome such as real time pattern detection and possible visualisation for mobile phone operators.

This paper presents an investigation of a pilot project that implemented a mobile payment platform in a poor community in Brazil. This project involved the creation of a network of organizations that includes a local microfinance institution, a large retail bank, a mobile phone operator, an international credit card company, and an acquirer, as well as small local merchants. The paper describes the process in which this platform was created and how it was maintained until it failed, one year after starting. Two conceptual approaches were combined for developing a theoretical understanding of this pilot project first to describe the process of interorganizational network establishment and second to analyze its evolution during its first year of operation. The study points to the critical role played by governance processes, the environmental dynamics and how it can compromise the success of establishment and maintenance of such inter-organizational networks.

International audience; Cellular networks have witnessed the emergence of the HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS) as a new video delivery method. In HAS, several qualities of the same videos are made available in the network so that clients can chose the best quality that fits their bandwidth capacity. This has particular implications on caching strategies with respect to the viewing patterns and the switching behavior between video qualities. In this paper we present analysis of a real HAS dataset collected in France and provided by the country's largest mobile phone operator. Firstly, we analyse the viewing patterns of HAS contents and the distribution of the encoding bitrates requested by mobile clients. Secondly, we give an in-depth analysis of the switching pattern between video bitrates during a video session and assess the implication on the caching efficiency. We also model this switching based on empirical observations. Finally, we propose WA-LRU a new caching algorithm tailored for HAS contents and compare it to the standard LRU. Our evaluations demonstrate that WA-LRU performs better and achieves its goals.

This paper discusses the value that data from mobile phone providers can bring into urban analysis. The novel argument is that the pervasiveness of mobile phone telephony has transformed mobile phones from a communications device to a tool for socio-spatial research. Put simply, mobile phone providers can potentially gather relevant data on a very refined spatio-temporal scale for every 85 out of 100 inhabitants in the world. Such data can include basic information about personal communication patterns, interactions and mobility which can enable researchers to better understand spatial human behavior, the predictability of which is well documented. These advances that have mostly taken place in the complexity science domain, which largely focuses on individual behavioural patterns, can also result in applications in the spatial analysis domain. This paper has two aims. Firstly, we critically discuss the existing state of the art of urban analysis based on big data from mobile phone operators. Based on this review, the paper takes a methodological turn to present some preliminary urban analysis results using data from a mobile phone operator in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Social network analysis techniques have been often used to derive useful knowledge from email and communication networks. However, most previous works considered an ideal scenario when full raw data were available for analysis. Unfortunately, such data raise privacy issues, and are often considered too valuable to be disclosed. In this paper we present the results of social network analysis of a very large volume of the telecommunication data acquired from a mobile phone operator. The data are highly aggregated, with only limited amount of information about individual connections between users. We show that even with such limited data, social network analysis methods provide valuable insights into the data and can reveal interesting patterns.

The magnitude of technological developments can be better understood nowadays in line with the developments particularly in the communication and mobile phone industries. These developments do not only trigger the production of new technology for mobile phones but they also bring forward the issue of conveying this technology to users. The applications and services produced for mobile phones are generally introduced to the market via Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) operators providing communication services. Users’ benefiting from these applications and services in their mobile phones or from their operators, depends on their preference of a GSM operator that has the capacity to meet the users’ needs. This study has aimed to determine the factors that influence the preference of a mobile phone operator among university students, the most active age group using mobile phones. Both factor analysis and multiple logistic regression analysis are used to determine the influential factors and the degree of influence in the preference of a GSM operator. It has been identified that the most influential variable on the preference of a GSM operator is the communication expenses as a socio-economic factor, whereas the brand factor is the most important variable in deciding which GSM operator service to purchase.

In this chapter, the reader will get an insight into one of the most easily employed techniques of voice, SMS, and identification data interception in GSM networks. Using a fake base station that mimics the behavior of a legitimate base station of the mobile phone operator, a malicious entity can convince mobile phones in a given area to handle their communication to it, effectively launching a man in the middle attack. This attack is possible only in GSM networks, since 3G employs mutual authentication, where the base station too has to authenticate its validity to the handset. However, it is relatively easy to use a jammer, jamming the 3G band. Almost every single mobile phone nowadays is multiband capable and as such it will fall back to GSM operation where it can be intercepted using the fake base station method.

This work utilises data from an Irish mobile phone network to provide a preliminary, but novel, analysis of the interurban communication network between twenty five of the largest cities and towns in Ireland. An intuitive technique is applied to a mobile phone operator's call detail records to identify the actual subscriber population of different urban areas with various penetration rates. Weighted communication links are generated between the urban centres based on spatial and temporal metrics of distance, and are examined for different times of the day and for different days of the week. These communication links are compared to the output of a standard gravity model in order to ascertain the latter's ability to accurately represent Ireland's interurban communication network. The results obtained are presented and discussed within. (6 pages)

Branding is increasingly being used as a strategy for managing markets in developed countries while developing countries still lag behind. The objective of this study was to assess the level of brand awareness and factors underlying brand preference of mobile phone service brands in Cape Coast market in Ghana. A total of 100 respondents who included individual consumers were selected using accidental simple sampling technique. Primary data was collected using structured interview schedules developed for each category of consumers. The findings of the study showed that most of the respondent consumers were aware of mobile phone operator brands despite having come across few operator service advertisements. Young males, mainly students in the tertiary institutions, single and of Christian affiliations, dominated the market. Four factors were identified as key determinants of mobile phone operator service choice, namely promotion, price and availability of product, attractive packaging and product quality. There is need for mobile phone operators to incorporate these findings in the formulation of responsive marketing strategies.

Multi-staged R&D projects are copy-book cases of compound real options. Traditional compound option models assume a constant volatility over the lifetime of the project. Building on the n-fold compound option model of Cassimon et al. (2004), we extend this model to allow for phase-specific volatility estimates, while preserving the closed-form solution of the model. We illustrate the extended model with a case study of a real option valuation of a multi-stage software application project by a large mobile phone operator and we show how project managers can estimate phase-specific volatilities.

Background It has been hypothesized that children and adolescents might be more vulnerable to possible health effects from mobile phone exposure than adults. We investigated whether mobile phone use is associated with brain tumor risk among children and adolescents. Methods CEFALO is a multicenter case-control study conducted in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Switzerland that includes all children and adolescents aged 7-19 years who were diagnosed with a brain tumor between 2004 and 2008. We conducted interviews, in person, with 352 case patients (participation rate: 83%) and 646 control subjects (participation rate: 71%) and their parents. Control subjects were randomly selected from population registries and matched by age, sex, and geographical region. We asked about mobile phone use and included mobile phone operator records when available. Odds ratios (ORs) for brain tumor risk and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were calculated using conditional logistic regression models. Results Regular users of mobile phones were not statistically significantly more likely to have been diagnosed with brain tumors compared with nonusers (OR = 1.36; 95% CI = 0.92 to 2.02). Children who started to use mobile phones at least 5 years ago were not at increased risk compared with those who had never regularly used mobile phones (OR = 1.26, 95% CI = 0.70 to 2.28). In a subset of study participants for whom operator recorded data were available, brain tumor risk was related to the time elapsed since the mobile phone subscription was started but not to amount of use. No increased risk of brain tumors was observed for brain areas receiving the highest amount of exposure. Conclusion The absence of an exposure-response relationship either in terms of the amount of mobile phone use or by localization of the brain tumor argues against a causal association.

We combine data from a field survey with transaction log data from a mobile phone operator to provide new insight into daily patterns of mobile phone use in Rwanda. The analysis is divided into three parts. First, we present a statistical comparison of the general Rwandan population to the population of mobile phone owners in Rwanda. We find that phone owners are considerably wealthier, better educated, and more predominantly male than the general population. Second, we analyze patterns of phone use and access, based on self-reported survey data. We note statistically significant differences by gender; for instance, women are more likely to use shared phones than men. Third, we perform a quantitative analysis of calling patterns and social network structure using mobile operator billing logs. By these measures, the differences between men and women are more modest, but we observe vast differences in utilization between the relatively rich and the relatively poor. Taken together, the evidence in this paper suggests that phones are disproportionately owned and used by the privileged strata of Rwandan society.

The market of mobile phone of Bangladesh is a stiff competition market. There are lots of competitions among the service provider in this sector. And people have the query to know the current situation in the market. To know the current situation of the market I collect some raw data, like – the amount of subscriber of different operators, from the “Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Committee (BTRC)” website and interpreted them to find out the performance of the various operators operating in this sector. Some other information is collected from the official website of the various companies. I use trend analysis and BCG matrix and other tools to find out performance of the companies using the raw data. At last by considering my analysis I draw a conclusion.