Deregulation and Enterprization in Central and Eastern Telecommunication - a Benchmark for the West?

The restructuring of telecommunication in Central and Eastern Europe occurs at a time when the classical structures of telecommunication are falling apart worldwide. Coming from the socialist system in which telecommunication did not exist as an independent economic activity, the Eastern European countries have created specific "post-socialist" modes of reform, often outdoing Western countries in terms of speed and radicality. Deregulation and enterprization have dominated the process in all countries, leading to advanced technical standards and a wide segmentation of telecommunication markets. The role of foreign direct investment and technology transfer was particularly important. But the reforms also lead to an increasing social gap between the prosperous users of advanced telecommunication services, and the average citizen for which even telephony has become a luxury good. Our thesis is that CEE telecommunication reform, rather than copying Western models, may become a benchmark for the West, in particular for Western Europe. Technically, the advanced reform countries in Central Europe are about to succeed the leapfrogging process, i.e. the jump from post-war socialist technologies to world-leading edge-of-technology standards. With regard to industry structures, Central and Eastern European countries show that the age of "classical" integrated telecommunication activities is definitely over. Instead, most diversified telecommunication services are integrated in the emerging information sector. Finally, the very notion of telecommunication as an "infrastructure" is put in question for the first time in Eastern Europe. We start to address the two relevant policy issues: modes of regulation, and science and technology policies to accompany the restructuring process.

Banking the unbanked using prepaid platforms and mobile telephones in the United States

The rapid growth of mobile phone usage and the continuous rise in wireless coverage fuel the expectations that access to financial services trough mobile phones could transform the way financial services are provided. The emergence of new and more efficient business models, can potentially resolve supply inefficiencies that explain the large unbanked population that exists in the USA, much larger than in most developed countries. Nearly 40 million US households (approximately 73 million people) are financially underserved (CFSI, 2007), of which 15 million households (approximately 28 million people) are totally unbanked. This problem is explained by the non adequacy of the value proposals offered by financial institutions to the demands of the US customers. The areas of poor alignment refer mostly to the design of products and the marketing and distribution networks used. To resolve these misalignments, this paper will argue that business models based on prepaid cards as products and mobile phones as transactional and distribution channels could be used in order to close the supply gap. We will call the business model proposed based on prepaid products and mobile phones mobile banking, since these two elements are the basis of the business model used companies such as Smart Money and G-Cash in the Phillipines, Wizzit in South Africa and M-Pesa in Kenya.prepaid platform; unbanked; financial services; mobile phones; prepaid cards;

A Case Study Of Power Saving Initiatives In A Telecommunication Company

Kajian ini adalah untuk menjukkan bagaimana inisiatif yang dijalankan oleh Syarikat Telekomunikasi X dalam penjimatan tenaga elektrik dan seterusnya pengurangan perbelanjaan operasi. The aim of this study is to provide the in itiatives done by Telecomm unication Company X in studying and implementing the power saving as part of operational expenditure reduction

Container ecosystem based PaaS solution for Telco Cloud Analysis and Proposal

Telco over Cloud, Network Function Virtualization andSoftware Defined Networking are changing thetelecommunications industry landscape, morespecifically in the Telco Service Providers networkinfrastructure and systems, by introducing cloudcomputing, virtualization paradigms and softwareapproaches which are already in use and mature intraditional IT environments.This paper introduces the current telco cloud landscapeand latest developments. It subsequently proposes acontainer based telco app orchestration mechanism.The shift of the telco cloud landscape towardscontainers is imperative as the traditional VM basedNFV and SDN solutions are running into scalabilityand performance problems and have an impact ondelivery speed and efficient resource utilization.In the solution we have derived in our lab uses a clustercontainer orchestration mechanism using ApacheMesos. A custom framework is developed to handle theTelco specific (NFV) capabilities on top of thetraditional containers. This novel approach will helptelcos to provision tons of containers in a span of shortduration adhering to the QoS Requirements of theindustry