Deployment Issues And Security Concerns With Wireless Local Area Networks: The Deployment Experience At A University

This paper presents and discusses various issues pertaining to the deployment of Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs).  The popularity of WLANs has steadily increased in the last two years and has led to their deployment in a variety of organizations.  Yet, making a business case for WLANs is an important step in their deployment.  In addition to highlighting the need for a business case for WLAN deployment, the paper outlines the reasons for, benefits of, and security problems associated with, their deployment.  The latter part of this paper presents a case study about the deployment of a WLAN at the University of Akron.  Therein, it discusses the context for the deployment, the process that was used to justify the deployment, and the efforts made to protect users’ information from security deficiencies of wireless networks

Off-Shoring And Outsourcing

Because of a dramatic decrease in transportation and telecommunication costs, the digital revolution, and the forces of globalization, off-shoring has accelerated in the past few years.  While there is little doubt that off-shoring has brought hardship to thousands of workers and communities, there is also little doubt that it has benefited many worker and communities.  Today, off-shoring continues to generate considerable debate on the long-run impact. Also, there is considerable misunderstanding about this phenomenon.  In this paper, the authors make a distinction among the terms outsourcing, offshore outsourcing, and off-shoring.  Off-shoring has been facilitated by a deconstruction of the value chain, allowing firms to evaluate all activities as potential candidates for being performed outside the firm.  Reasons for the acceleration of off-shoring are outlined.  An explanation of why off-shoring is not a villain for the developed economies is also provided

Directive versus empowering leadership: A field experiment comparing impacts on task proficiency and proactivity

Using a field experiment in the United Arab Emirates, we compared the impacts of directive and empowering leadership on customer-rated core task proficiency and proactive behaviors. Results of tests for main effects demonstrated that both directive and empowering leadership increased work unit core task proficiency, but only empowering leadership increased proactive behaviors. Examination of boundary conditions revealed that directive leadership enhanced proactive behaviors for work units that were highly satisfied with their leaders, whereas empowering leadership had stronger effects on both core task proficiency and proactive behaviors for work units that were less satisfied with their leaders. We discuss implications for both theory and practice. © Academy of Management Journal

Versican G3 Promotes Mouse Mammary Tumor Cell Growth, Migration, and Metastasis by Influencing EGF Receptor Signaling

Increased versican expression in breast tumors is predictive of relapse and has negative impact on survival rates. The C-terminal G3 domain of versican influences local and systemic tumor invasiveness in pre-clinical murine models. However, the mechanism(s) by which G3 influences breast tumor growth and metastasis is not well characterized. Here we evaluated the expression of versican in mouse mammary tumor cell lines observing that 4T1 cells expressed highest levels while 66c14 cells expressed low levels. We exogenously expressed a G3 construct in 66c14 cells and analyzed its effects on cell proliferation, migration, cell cycle progression, and EGFR signaling. Experiments in a syngeneic orthotopic animal model demonstrated that G3 promoted tumor growth and systemic metastasis in vivo. Activation of pERK correlated with high levels of G3 expression. In vitro, G3 enhanced breast cancer cell proliferation and migration by up-regulating EGFR signaling, and enhanced cell motility through chemotactic mechanisms to bone stromal cells, which was prevented by inhibitor AG 1478. G3 expressing cells demonstrated increased CDK2 and GSK-3β (S9P) expression, which were related to cell growth. The activity of G3 on mouse mammary tumor cell growth, migration and its effect on spontaneous metastasis to bone in an orthotopic model was modulated by up-regulating the EGFR-mediated signaling pathway. Taken together, EGFR-signaling appears to be an important pathway in versican G3-mediated breast cancer tumor invasiveness and metastasis

Competition and Market Strategies in the Swiss Fixed Telephony Market. An estimation of Swisscom’s dynamic residual demand curve.

Fixed telephony has long been a fundamentally important market for European telecommunications operators. The liberalisation and the introduction of regulation in the end of the 1990s, however, allowed new entrants to compete with incumbents at the retail level. A rapid price decline and a decline in revenues followed. Increased retail competition consequently led a number of national regulators to deregulate this market. In 2013, however, many European countries (including Switzerland) continued to have partially binding retail price regulation. More than a decade after liberalisation and the introduction of wholesale and retail price regulation, sufficient data is available to empirically measure the success of regulation and assess its continued necessity. This paper develops a market model based on a generalised version of the traditional “dominant firm – competitive fringe” model allowing the incumbent also more competitive conduct than that of a dominant firm. A system of simultaneous equations is developed and direct estimation of the incumbent‟s residual demand function is performed by instrumenting the market price by incumbent-specific cost shifting variables as well as other variables. Unlike earlier papers that assess market power in this market, this paper also adjusts the market model to ensure a sufficient level of cointegration and avoid spurious regression results. This necessitates introducing intertemporal effects. While the incumbent's conduct cannot be directly estimated using this framework, the concrete estimates show that residual demand is inelastic (long run price elasticity of residual demand of -0.12). Such a level of elasticity is, however, only compatible with a profit maximising incumbent in the case of largely competitive conduct (conduct parameter below 0.12 and therefore close to zero). It is therefore found that the Swiss incumbent acted rather competitively in the fixed telephony retail market in the period under review (2004-2012) and that (partial) retail price caps in place can no longer be justified on the basis of a lack of competition

Effective regulation versus tacit collusion in the long-distance market: an empirical analysis

Deregulation, Long-distance telecommunications, Tacit collusion, L1, L5,

Traditional and Non-Traditional Determinants of Accounting Rates in International Telecommunications

The accounting rate system currently in place is used to reimburse telephone companies around the world for terminating calls originating in foreign countries. Increased competition in more liberalized countries has led to imbalances between traffic originating in these countries and traffic coming in from less liberalized countries, leading to huge settlement payments being made to less liberalized countries. Some variation in accounting rates across countries can be explained by traditional factors such as the actual cost of terminating calls. Our results suggest that accounting rates are also significantly affected by non-traditional factors such as the extent of government regulation, the level of corruption, and the like. These findings support the need for consideration of these factors in reforming the accounting rate system currently in place. “High settlement rates are a product of oligopolistic cooperation in a market with little transparency and anti-competitive regulation in the majority of nations” [Cowhey, 1998 ; p. 908]. Copyright IAES 2006L96,