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This book suggests an ecosystem approach to broadband policy that could help in the design of strategies, policies, and programs that support network expansion, have the potential to transform economies, improve the quality and range of services, enable application development, and broaden adoption among users. To identify emerging best practices to nurture this ecosystem, this volume analyzes the Republic of Korea and other leading broadband markets. It identifies three building blocks to support the growth of the broadband ecosystem: defining visionary but flexible strategies, using competition to promote market growth, and facilitating demand. An important but often neglected building block is demand facilitation. This includes raising awareness about the benefits of broadband and improving affordability and accessibility for the largest number of users. Successful countries have often focused on creating a suite of useful applications that increase the relevance of broadband to the widest base of users. Programs to mainstream information and communication technology (ICT) use in education, health, or government have been common.

This book is a compilation of two recently completed works on the convergence of information and communication technology (ICT) (Singh and Raja 2008, 2009). Since then, convergence, the eroding of boundaries among previously separate ICT services, networks, and business practices, has accelerated and deepened. At the time these reports were written, convergence was already a reality and was picking up pace in low-income countries, as in the rest of the world. Now, as this introduction summarizes, broadband networks are reaching deeper into previously unserved areas. The growing number of people connected to broadband networks are consuming, sharing, and creating new multimedia content and applications. And they are doing this on handheld and portable devices that are less costly and do more than before. All sorts of users, governments, businesses, individuals, and ICT firms, are looking to cut costs while capturing greater value. Taken together, these trends indicate that convergence is set to accelerate even through the ongoing global economic downturn. Countries that enable convergence through appropriate policy and regulatory responses will realize significant benefits in terms of expanded access, lower prices, and greater competition. Chapter two of this book focuses on the strategic implications of convergence and possible policy responses. Chapter three focuses on emerging regulatory practices facilitating multiple plays, or the provision of multiple services, such as voice telephony, broadcasting, and Internet access, by one operator over a single communications network, typically telephone or cable television but increasingly mobile and fixed wireless networks. The book concludes by presenting several best-practice principles for regulatory responses to multiple plays and, to some extent, to convergence more generally. Indeed, the main task for regulators is to remove artificial barriers and restrictions that are remnants of legacy regulation, thus clearing the way for market forces to play out, promoting the public interest, and leading to the realization of a range of benefits for users.

In order to meet the cold testing requirements of high‐frequency systems for gyrotron travelling wave tube (Gyro‐TWT), a novel broadband circular waveguide TE31 mode converter is designed and verified in this letter. The designed mode converter adopts a power‐divider waveguide network with twisted waveguides to realise efficient broadband conversion from rectangular waveguide TE10 mode to circular waveguide TE31 mode. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed circular waveguide TE31 mode converter exhibits an input port return loss better than 21 dB and an insertion loss less than 0.11 dB. It realises high conversion efficiency (>97.5%) in a relative bandwidth of 41%. A prototype circular waveguide TE31 mode converter is fabricated and characterised through back‐to‐back cold‐test and infrared field pattern imaging. The experimental results closely align with the theoretical predictions, with a deviation of less than 0.1 dB between the two values. In this letter, a wideband circular waveguide TE31 mode converter is presented and verified. The mode converter adopts a power divider with three twisted‐wave guides and a circular waveguide to realise efficient broadband conversion from rectangular waveguide TE10 mode to circular waveguide TE31 mode. The experimental results closely align with the theoretical predictions.

Broadband networks can play a special role as \"general purpose technologies\" that enable or facilitate the use of other Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), including a plethora of internet-based services, such as e-commerce, e-government, e-learning or social media. Due to the better quality and availability of statistical data, most empirical studies on the economic effects of broadband have focused on their impact on growth, employment and productivity in developed countries. In this study, we set out the reasons why these economic effects should also be relevant for developing countries and examine the potential advantages of increasing broadband take-up. To analyze the significance of broadband for economic development, we specify and estimate an econometric model for nine South American countries, for which relatively high quality data was available. According to our results, increased broadband penetration is associated with significant \"spillover\" effects, excess societal returns over and above the expected returns of other investments in physical capital.

This paper proposes a modified architecture of the Long-Term Evolution (LTE) mobile network to provide services for the Internet of Things (IoT). This is achieved by allocating a narrow bandwidth and transferring the scheduling functions from the eNodeB base station to an NB-IoT controller. A method for allocating uplink and downlink resources of the LTE/NB-IoT hybrid technology is applied to ensure the Quality of Service (QoS) from end-to-end. This method considers scheduling traffic/resources on the NB-IoT controller, which allows eNodeB planning to remain unchanged. This paper also proposes a prioritization approach within the IoT traffic to provide End-to-End (E2E) QoS in the integrated LTE/NB-IoT network. Further, we develop “smart queue” management algorithms for the IoT traffic prioritization. To demonstrate the feasibility of our approach, we performed a number of experiments using simulations. We concluded that our proposed approach ensures high end-to-end QoS of the real-time traffic by reducing the average end-to-end transmission delay.

New physical–mathematical models for the calculation of the outage probability of the maximal ratio combining and selection combining dual branch spatial diversity schemes for broadband fixed wireless access networks operating above 10 GHz are presented. At these frequency bands and considering line-of-sight conditions, rain attenuation is the dominant fading mechanism, which should be taken into account in the radio communications system design. The models are based on bivariate inverse Gaussian (IG) distribution and on the adoption of a spatial correlation coefficient for the convergent terrestrial wireless links. IG distribution has been shown that models accurately the rain attenuation fading for both temperate and tropical climatic regions. The models are validated with numerical results and some useful conclusions are drawn.

Following the increasing growth in the demand on mobile TV, hybrid broadcast/broadband networks emerged as a suitable approach to overtake the challenges introduced by each network separately in order to enhance users’ experience. This paper presents two possible scenarios for a hybrid, spatially separated, broadcast/broadband network to offer mobile TV linear services for the end users. Namely, the first scenario is based on shared spectrum access for both networks while the second one proposes a dedicated spectrum. Using a stochastic geometry approach, the paper derives analytical formulations for both the probability of coverage and ergodic capacity. These formulations are then used to optimize the hybrid network in terms of its key design parameters including the broadcast (BC) coverage radii, the broadband (BB) base stations’ (BS) density, and spectral capacity. The results have shown that an optimal BC radius maximizing the probability of coverage and capacity exists and it depends on the BS density of the BB network. Other design parameters have been provided and analyzed leading to an optimal network deployment. To the best of the author’s knowledge, this paper presents a first reference work dealing with the optimization of the hybrid network with the coexistence of broadband and broadcast networks, from stochastic geometry perspective, taking into account the inter-cell interference.

One of the main problems in video transmission is the bandwidth fluctuation in wireless channel. Therefore, there is an urgent need to find an efficient bandwidth utilization and method. This research utilizes the Combined Scalable Video Coding (CSVC) which comes from Joint Scalable Video Model (JSVM). In the combined scalable video coding, we implement Coarse Grain Scalability (CGS) and Medium Grain Scalability (MGS). We propose a new scheme in which it can be implemented on Network Simulator II (NS-2) over wireless broadband network. The advantages of this new scheme over the other schemes are more realistic and based on open source program. The result shows that CSVC implementation on MGS mode outperforms CGS mode.

Broadband mobile networks have rapidly evolved over the last years. The unique environment they operate, however, sets new challenges for the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). In this paper, we study the impact of Long Term Evolution (LTE) handover on TCP performance with different TCP congestion control algorithms and in a wide range of networks settings, including different handover types, random channel errors and support of error correction at lower layers. Our results suggest that the congestion control algorithms employed by TCP variants during the LTE X2 handover have different impacts on TCP performance. In particular CUBIC, Scalable TCP and BIC-TCP achieve high goodput and fast window convergence in available channel capacity after LTE X2 handover. In environments involving packet drops that are not corrected at lower layers and single errors with high probability, all TCP variants exhibit very low performance levels. Finally, in terms of fairness, our results identify fairness issues among TCP flows with different Bandwidth Delay Products (BDP), with CUBIC offering the best results.