Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

This section is an exploratory study about factors affecting the usage of T-government services for payments through Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) and how policy measures can influence adoption. The widely known predicting model of ICT user acceptance UTAUT (Unified Theory of acceptance and Use of Technology) is applied to recognize those factors affecting usage, exploiting a dataset coming from an Italian T-government project. T-government stands for a wide set of services addressed to citizens (e.g. about health, education, tourism, payment of bills), delivered by a Public Administration or a private provider, and accessible through Digital Television. One of the opportunities given by T-government is to promote the use of ICT-based public services by large groups of people (e.g., the elderly), who haven’t got any Internet access or the required skills to use it.

With the Internet evolution, and the development of next generation networks, there are natural questions about how the network will be managed and if/how public intervention will be made possible to improve its mode of functioning, as well as what will be or should be the business model representing the economic relations between all involved actors. Those issues are related to the so-called Internet governance, defined as the development of principle rules to shape the evolution and use of the Internet. Those questions arise especially because of the evolution from an academic to an interconnection of private networks and actors, and the emergence of new technologies that have to be fully deployed. The decentralized nature of the Internet of next generation networks in general, makes it also difficult to lead to a (socially) acceptable situation, with economic actors often trying to behave only towards what suits them the best.

The deployment of NGNs (Next Generation Networks) has led to a change for the public role in the telecommunications industry. Now the public support is seen as not only responsible for the regulatory framework where market forces thrive, but as the leading force behind infrastructure deployment and innovative boosting measures. This section reviews the ways in which involvement of public administrations in the deployment of NGNs is happening. Subsequently, it focuses on the analysis of the European case and particularly on the Guidelines for the application of State aid rules that the European Commission published on Sept. 2009.

This section discusses the possible role of Public Private Partnership (PPP) in the development of infrastructure for Next Generation Networks. The focus is on the developing countries perspective. Case studies describe the African approach in using PPP to fund telecom infrastructure development in rural areas.

This section deals with the network neutrality debate to define the economic relationships between Internet access providers and (distant) content providers. We review the various definitions of what should be a neutral network, the outcome of all international consultations on the topic, and the arguments of network neutrality proponents and opponents.

This section describes an approximate model built from real sub-system performance data, of a public wireless network (3G / LTE) in view of minimum net energy consumption or minimum emissions per time unit and per user. This approach is justified in order to generate the integrated view required for “green” optimizations, while taking into account service demand and operations While subsystems with lower native energy footprints are being migrated into public networks, the many adaptation mechanisms at sub-system, protocol and management levels make system complexity too high to design major comprehensive “green” trade-offs. However, by focusing on the incremental effects of a new network user, the approximate model allows marginal effects to be estimated with good accuracy. This capability allows for the provisioning of personalized energy / emissions reducing tariffs to end users with inherent advantages both to operators, energy suppliers and users. One key advantage is the possibility to reduce waste capacity, and thus energy consumption in the network, by allowing the user to specify just the service capacity and demands he/she has. From an engineering point of view, the incremental model allows to tune sub-system characteristics jointly, especially transceivers, transmission and storage. From a configuration point of view, the model allows to determine which nodes in the network benefit most from back-up and renewable power sources. From a business perspective, the model allows to determine trade-offs between personalized bundle characteristics and the energy cost share in the marginal operating expense share. Detailed sub-system model and design improvements are carried out on a continuous basis in collaboration with industry.

This section analyses the environmental impact of ICT. This is done through an analysis on how two specific applications (tele-work and teleshopping) affect transport behavior. These two applications are considered to have a large potential with regard to savings in energy consumption.

We introduce in this section potential business models for the deployment of optic fiber networks. Because Fiber-to-the-Home is deployed at a slower speed than expected, we describe the evolution in several European countries, identify the reasons of the differences, propose a holistic approach to improve the business, and present a game-theoretic model to evaluate the impact of municipality investments on the market.

Operations and Business Support Systems (OSS/BSS) software of Communication Service Providers (CSP’s) can be developed internally within the CSP or acquired from a Software Vendor. The software industry lifecycle model hypothesizes that software development is internal in the beginning of the industry’s lifecycle, and that the share of external products increases when it matures. Empirical evidence shows signs of the OSS/BSS software industry approaching maturity. Current and future developments of the industry include the possibilities of utilizing the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model and Open Source software (OSSw). Both have gained increasing interest by the CSP’s. However, the relatively small markets (number of CSP’s), added with complex and proprietary interfaces of technology and software, seem to hinder this development. The results of scenarios on the future of the industry propose that the adoption of SaaS and OSSw could be motivated by general cost-cutting, by alliances within the industry or by a focus of CSP’s business on either providing network capacity or value-added services.

In this chapter, current issues of the Internet are addressed and arising problems of future Internet from socio-technical point of view are tackled. The future Internet considered as a Next Generation Network (NGN) will provide integrated services, i.e. interactive, multimedia, data, real-time, and mobile services. The focus will be placed on the end-user for whom this information and communications technologies (ICT) are primarily designed for. The user’s dependence on ICT is rising, being tied to increasing complexity of critical infrastructures (CIs) interdependencies. No wonder that also other stakeholders (service providers and network operators) have to be in the focus.