Infrastructural Drivers of Online Shopping: An International Perspective

While online shopping expenditures have been increasing in both developed and developing economies, they still account for a small share of total retail sales. Significant differences also exist across countries in the amount of money consumers spend on a per capita basis on online purchases. The authors utilize the conceptual foundations of infrastructural framework to examine the effects of infrastructural drivers on online shopping expenditures in 43 countries. Findings show that per capita telecommunications investments and per capita gross national income are significantly associated with per capita online shopping expenditures. Privacy protection, Internet penetration, and credit card penetration were not significant

Telecommunications Network Planning and Maintenance

Telecommunications network operators are on a constant challenge to provide new services which require ubiquitous broadband access. In an attempt to do so, they are faced with many problems such as the network coverage or providing the guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS). Network planning is a multi-objective optimization problem which involves clustering the area of interest by minimizing a cost function which includes relevant parameters, such as installation cost, distance between user and base station, supported traffic, quality of received signal, etc. On the other hand, service assurance deals with the disorders that occur in hardware or software of the managed network. This paper presents a large number of multicriteria techniques that have been developed to deal with different kinds of problems regarding network planning and service assurance. The state of the art presented will help the reader to develop a broader understanding of the problems in the domain

Optimal pricing strategies for capacity leasing based on time and volume usage in telecommunication networks

In this study, we use a monopoly pricing model to examine the optimal pricing strategies for “pay-per-time”, “pay-per-volume” and “pay-per both time and volume” based leasing of data networks. Traditionally, network capacity distribution includes short/long term bandwidth and/or usage time leasing. Each consumer has a choice to select volume based, connection-time based or both volume and connection-time based pricing. When customers choose connection-time based pricing, their optimal behavior would be utilizing the bandwidth capacity fully, which can cause network to burst. Also, offering the pay-per-volume scheme to the consumer provides the advantage of leasing the excess capacity to other potential customers serving as network providers. However, volume-based strategies are decreasing the consumers’ interest and usage, because the optimal behaviors of the customers who choose the pay-per-volume pricing scheme generally encourages them to send only enough bytes for time-fixed tasks (for real time applications), causing quality of the task to decrease, which in turn creating an opportunity cost. Choosing pay-per time and volume hybridized pricing scheme allows customers to take advantages of both pricing strategies while decreasing (minimizing) the disadvantages of each, because consumers generally have both time-fixed and size-fixed task such as batch data transactions. However, such a complex pricing policy may confuse and frighten consumers. Therefore, in this study we examined the following two issues: (i) what (if any) are the benefits to the network provider of providing the time and volume hybridized pricing scheme? and (ii) would this offering schema make an impact on the market size? The main contribution of this study is to show that pay-per both time and volume pricing is a viable and often preferable alternative to the only time and/or only volume-based offerings for a large number of customers, and that judicious use of such pricing policy is profitable to the network provider

Approaches for Future Internet architecture design and Quality of Experience (QoE) Control

Researching a Future Internet capable of overcoming the current Internet limitations is a strategic investment. In this respect, this paper presents some concepts that can contribute to provide some guidelines to overcome the above-mentioned limitations. In the authors' vision, a key Future Internet target is to allow applications to transparently, efficiently and flexibly exploit the available network resources with the aim to match the users' expectations. Such expectations could be expressed in terms of a properly defined Quality of Experience (QoE). In this respect, this paper provides some approaches for coping with the QoE provision problem