Assessment of First Comer Advantages and Network Effects; the Case of Turkish GSM Market

First comer advantages and network effects are frequently stated as among the most important determinants of market structures and this is particularly relevant for network economies including telecommunications markets. Connected to this, regulatory tools such as number portability have frequently been used to reduce market imperfections resulting from these effects. Within this context, this paper aims to analyze the role of these factors in creating the current market structure of Turkish GSM sector. By examining relevant data such as development of market shares in a historical perspective and by making use of consumer surveys, it is concluded that the dominant operator has benefited from being first comer in the market and established a stable market share (power) due to network effects that are used by this firm deliberately to entrench its position especially in the form of switching costs, scale economies, brand image and tariff (on-net vs. off-net pricing) differentiation; however, it is also observed that introduction of number portability lead to reduction in switching costs, increasing market competition. --First comer advantages,Network effects,Mobile telephony (GSM),number portability,Competition,Regulation and Consumer preferences

Achieving the Internal Market for e-communications. CEPS Task Force Reports, 20 June 2008

Over the past two years, the debate on the review of the EU regulatory framework for electronic communications has become hectic. After the European Commission adopted its proposed set of measures in November 2007, the European Parliament has shown an unprecedented interest in topics such as spectrum policy, functional separation of the incumbents’ networks, the creation of a new European authority on telecoms, etc. After the successful experience of the first CEPS Task Force on “Policy Challenges for the Information Superhighway”, which ended in June 2006, a new Task Force on “Achieving the Internal Market for e-communications” was launched by CEPS with the explicit aim to provide expertise to Members of the European Parliament in their reading of the proposed review. The Task Force was chaired by Magnus Lemmel, former Acting Director General at DG Enterprise, European Commission, and currently Senior Advisor at KREAB. This report summarises the results of the opinions that were expressed over five meetings, the last two of which took place inside the European Parliament. This highly influential report was drafted by Andrea Renda, Senior Research Fellow at CEPS

Mobile payment systems in Turkey

This chapter presents a brief introduction to electronic payments in Turkey followed by a detailed look into direct carrier billing (DCB)

Mobile payment systems in Turkey

This chapter presents a brief introduction to electronic payments in Turkey followed by a detailed look into direct carrier billing (DCB)

On the design, implementation and experimental evaluation of a novel gateway architecture for the GSM Short Message Service

Congestion and capacity pi'ohIens of the existing mobile communication networks of the late eighties resulted in the demand for a brand new mobile telephony standard. Competition amongst the various existing standards implementation was fierce and lead to the availability of a plethora of incompatible networks and very little hope for the establishment of a global technology geared up to the expectancy of the users. Paging network were widely used as a cheaper alternative to voice enabled networks and were Offering users the ability to receive textual information while on the move. Bridging the gap between the paging world and the mobile communication world was essential. The Global System for Mobile communications was designed as the European answer. The European alternative was promising a feature rich, secure and truly global system with the added ability to handle two-way paging like functionalities with the Short Message Service (SMS). The success of a new service such as SMS relies heavily on its adoption by a majority of users. which in turn is mainly a consequence of the availability of software application gateways. In the mid nineties a Sheffield based software company realising the market needs teamed up with the University's research department to produce the first commercially available gateway architecture for the SMS. The resulting work is described in this thesis. The first part of the analysis examines the architecture of' a (ISM network and the building blocks of the SMS. The technical implementation is described and the fundamental properties examined such as roaming. routing, protocol limitations, usability and interoperahility problems. The specification and design of the gateway architecture is then addressed with an emphasis on character set conversion, routing and queLicing issues. The implementation details are then examined with a description of each of' the modules. The performance of the gateway is examined with the implenientation of a test bed fed by traffic generated by customers. The issues examined were: identification of bottlenecks, protocol efficiencies and an analysis of the chosen queueing model implementation. The second part of the analysis presents the results obtained from the measurements taken for a period of a year. Arm analytical model was formulated to validate the results from the measurements. The comparison revealed the ability of the model to simulate the behaviour of the gateway under medium to heavy loads and highlighted the areas that would be most affected by optimisation. The important factors limiting throughput and quality of service were di scoverecl in the capacity of the connections to network operators and policy chosen for the message queues. An alternative queueing discipline is proposed that would lead to increased fairness offered to the wide variety of applications connected to the gateway and the network operators through a single link of' known capacity. Interactive conversations such as quizzes and gaines based are offered low latency while more bandwidth demanding ones such as mass voting applications benefit from very high throughput. The overall gateway,architecture described was the first one of its kind and consequently each of its module was designed and implemented from scratch. As a result Dialogue (Tommnunicatmons benefited l'i'omn the novelty and head start needed in a fierce competitive market to position itself as a market leader ]it mobile applications and services, competing with global companies such as Logica. Ericcson or Microsoft

Use of Mobile Phone Technology in Education for Easy Accessibility of Information: Challenges and Prospects

Information and communication technology has opened up such tremendous vistas for modern societies that any failure to master it would mean a life of permanent subordination. The evolution of Mobile phone makes it possible to work with distance learning, achieve a closer collaboration among teachers and students and also pave way for a new pedagogical approach where there is unparalleled ability to spread knowledge and disseminate information. This research adopted a survey design which sought information from respondents on the Use of Mobile phone Technology in Education for Easy Accessibility of Information. Three research questions guided the study. The population comprised five thousand, eight hundred secondary school graduate teachers in 265 public secondary schools in Anambra State. Disproportionate stratified-random sampling technique was adopted in selecting one thousand three hundred and sixty-five teachers for the study. A questionnaire entitled “Use of Mobile Phone Technology in Education” was developed by the researcher, validated by experts and used for data collection. Pearson’s Product Moment Correlation Co-efficient was used to obtain a reliability coefficient of 0.84. Data were collected and analyzed using mean and standard deviation. The findings revealed services obtained from the use of mobile phone ineducation to include making and receiving of voice calls, sending and receiving SMS, browsing the wireless application protocol sites, taking photos and recording videos, receiving local AM/FM stations, sharing and receiving multimedia messages/calls, connection to the internet & WWW etc. Challenges include lack of skilled ICT personnel, related infrastructure, reliable source of power supply, technologist for routine repairs among others. Based on the findings, recommendations include among others that government should organize workshops, seminars, and conferences for stakeholder and teachers to be trained on the use of mobile phone in education, adopt ICT international standard in Nigerian educational curriculum and provide reliable source of power and relevant infrastructures in the schools.Key word: Mobile Phone, Technology, Education, Challenges & Prospect

Getting parents involved in child's school: using attendance application system based on SMS gateway

Along with the development of communication technology, and information system, more and more also made the attendance system, and academic information. The development of a more modern absentee system with respect to the honesty side needs to be built as a substitute for manual absence using paper. Attendance system is at once can be a new standard on attendance system in Education environment. The choice of fingerprint attendance system based on communication technology in the form of SMS is because it is more practical, cheap, and efficient to convey information. Parents do not have to bother anymore come to school just to know the presence or absence of his son / daughter. In the implementation of this application, in the early stages of the user must register their identity by using the application program absenteeism built with PHP programming language, to further stored the absence data into the database My SQL which has integrated SMS Gateway through the SMS sending software that is Gammu. In addition with SMS Gateway technology, parents will be easier to obtain information on the presence of his son / daughter. From the student side, it is hoped that it will foster discipline attitude in time because indirectly this application will grow the mental attitude on time to the students, and it is expected that this application can fix any deficiencies in attendance application that has been implemented earlier

The Use of Global System of Mobile Communication (GSM) Among University Students in Malaysia

This study examines the use of the Global System of Mobile Communication (GSM) among University students in Malaysia. The survey approach was used in data collection from a sample population from University Teknologi Malaysia. Fifty undergraduate and post graduate students were sampled at the university library. Results from a multiple regression analysis shows that there is a significant relationship between age, monthly income/allowance of respondents, marital status and rate of calls made and received per day (P<0.05). Gender and mode of study were found to be insignificant (P>0.05).Results from t test equally indicate that the respondents do not vary in their perception on benefits derivable from the use of GSM (t = -.483, P >0.05).Majority of the respondents also agreed that they use GSM to contact their lecturers, course mates, parents, siblings and sending of short message services (SMS).The study conclude with discussions on findings which would be relevant to education policy makers and other interest partie