Supply-Push or Demand-Pull as Driver for Local Access Provisioning? - Initial Findings from Interviews with Market Actors

This paper analyzes push-pull initiatives of technological development by studying the concept of Novel Access Provisioning of new wireless Internet access to existing backbone infrastructure. The Novel Access Provisioning project is conducted within the Swedish techno-economic research project with participants from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm School of Economics (SSE) and the Swedish Telecom Agency (PTS). This paper reports on the results from a series of interviews during the fall of 2005 with main representatives from within the Telecom Industry and outside in the Nordic market having an interest in the development and use of mobile services. The aim of the paper is to increase the understanding for why some innovations have a rapid rate of adoption while others are deployed more slowly

Urban Ecosystem Services and Tourism

Urban tourism depends on the place specific qualities of destinations. In many cities, climate change poses a threat to these qualities, through increasing risk of excessive heat, draught and flooding. Cities need to adapt to reduce these risks. One way of doing this is to improve their green infrastructure. Urban forests, parks, rivers and wetlands may help reduce the effects of climate change in cities. At the same time, green infrastructure provide a variety of ecosystem services to the community. In particular, cultural ecosystem services such as recreation, andesthetical values take place in urban green infrastructure; they provide value in the form of improved experiences. These mainly benefit the locals but they may also be important for tourism. Such relations between ecosystem services and tourism have in earlier literature been recognized in rural contexts but very seldom in urban. This paper reports preliminary findings from qualitative case studies in the South of Sweden and Berlin, Germany. They focus on how urban planning projects (primarily aimed at mitigating GHG emissions and adapting to climatechange) can be extended to develop places where experience values for both residents and visitors are created alongside other kinds of ecosystem services. We suggest that the need for climate change adaptation in a city may be used as a means to improve its place specific qualities as a tourist destination. By developing green infrastructure in innovative and environmentally friendly ways, the quality of ecosystem services improves, including those relevant for both visitors and residents. Protecting and building green infrastructure, therebyenhancing a city´s visible qualities and its reputation as a sustainable destination, may also be valuable in marketing the city

Revenue requirements for mobile operators with ultra-high mobile broadband data traffic growth.

Mobile broadband data access over cellular networks has been established as a major new service in just a few years. The mobile broadband penetration has risen from almost zero to between 10 and 15 per cent in Western European leading markets from 2007 to the end of 2009. More than 75% of network traffic was broadband data in 2009, and the data volumes are growing rapidly. But the revenue generation is the reverse as the average for operators in Europe in 2009 was around 77 per cent of service revenues from voice, 10 per cent from SMS and 13 per cent from other data. Voice and broadband data service are built on two quite different business models. Voice pricing is volume based. Revenue depends linearly on the number of voice minutes. Broadband data service on the other hand is mainly flat fee based even if different levels are being introduced as well as tiers. Revenue is decoupled from traffic and therefore also from operating costs and investment requirements. This is what we define as a revenue gap. Earnings as well as internal financing will suffer from increasing traffic per user unless the flat fee can be raised or changed to volume based, other revenue can be obtained and/or operating costs and investments can be reduced accordingly. Observable trends and common forecasts indicate strong growth of mobile broadband traffic as well as declining revenue from mobile voice in the next five year period. This outlook suggests a prospective revenue gap with weak top-line growth and expanding operating costs and investment requirements. This is not only a profitability and cash flow issue. It may also severely restrict the industry's revenue and profit growth potential if it is handled mainly by cost-cutting. In sections 2 - 4 we describe related work, our contribution, the specific research questions as well as the methodology and its problems. Section 5 is an overview of mobile operators' revenue, its sources and development till today. Section 6 presents trends, developments and published forecasts that may be relevant for the future. Section 7 contains our conclusions. --Mobile broadband,mobile operator revenues,revenue requirements,voice revenues,non-voice revenues

Assessing the Co-Benefits of Household Energy Technology Carbon Offset Projects

There has been an increase of carbon finance in recent years to offset projects in developing countries that claim to produce significant local development benefits, also called co-benefits. Household energy technology projects are an example of carbon offset projects that are claimed to both mitigate climate change and create development co-benefits. This report uses case studies from household energy technology projects in Cambodia and Lao PDR to examine how the co-benefits of household energy technology carbon offset projects are assessed and what possible gaps there are in current academic assessment approaches. The research for this book has been carried out under the ‘Scaling up low carbon household technologies in the lower Mekong Subregion’. The project commenced in 2012 and has been funded by the Nordic Climate Facility (NCF), which is financed by the Nordic Development Fund (NDF) and administrated by Nordic Environment Finance Corporation (NEFCO)