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Through the lens of culture,The Internet of Elsewherelooks at the role of the Internet as a catalyst in transforming communications, politics, and economics. Cyrus Farivar explores the Internet's history and effects in four distinct and, to some, surprising societies-Iran, Estonia, South Korea, and Senegal. He profiles Web pioneers in these countries and, at the same time, surveys the environments in which they each work. After all, contends Farivar, despite California's great success in creating the Internet and spawning companies like Apple and Google, in some areas the United States is still years behind other nations. Surprised?You won't be for long as Farivar proves there are reasons that: Skype was invented in Estonia-the same country that developed a digital ID system and e-voting;Iran was the first country in the world to arrest a blogger, in 2003;South Korea is the most wired country on the planet, with faster and less expensive broadband than anywhere in the United States;Senegal may be one of sub-Saharan Africa's best chances for greater Internet access.The Internet of Elsewherebrings forth a new complex and modern understanding of how the Internet spreads globally, with both good and bad effects.

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.

Crude oil plays an important role in the global economy, as it contributes one-third of the energy consumption worldwide. However, despite its importance in policymaking and economic development, forecasting its price is still challenging due to its complexity and irregular price trends. Although a significant amount of research has been conducted to improve forecasting using external factors as well as machine-learning and deep-learning models, only a few studies have used hybrid models to improve prediction accuracy. In this study, we propose a novel hybrid model that captures the finer details and interconnections between multivariate factors to improve the accuracy of petroleum oil price prediction. Our proposed hybrid model integrates a convolutional neural network and a recurrent neural network with skip connections and is trained using petroleum oil prices and external data directly accessible from the official website of South Korea’s national oil corporation and the official Yahoo Finance site. We compare the performance of our univariate and multivariate models in terms of the Pearson correlation, mean absolute error, mean squared error, root mean squared error, and R squared (R2) evaluation metrics. Our proposed models exhibited significantly better performance than the existing models based on long short-term memory and gated recurrent units, showing correlations of 0.985 and 0.988, respectively, for 10-day price predictions and obtaining better results for longer prediction periods when compared with other deep-learning models. We validated that our proposed model with skip connections outperforms the benchmark models and showed that the convolutional neural network using gated recurrent units with skip connections is superior to the compared models. The findings suggest that, to some extent, relying on a single source of data is ineffective in predicting long-term changes in oil prices, and thus, to develop a better prediction model based on time-series based data, it is necessary to take a multivariate approach and develop an efficient computational model with skip connections.

Rapidly increasing mobile data traffic have placed a significant burden on mobile Internet networks. Due to limited network capacity, a mobile network is congested when it handles too much data traffic simultaneously. In turn, some customers leave the network, which induces a revenue loss for the mobile service provider. To manage demand and maximize revenue, we propose a dynamic plan control method for the mobile service providers under connection-speed-restriction pricing. This method allows the mobile service provider to dynamically set the data plans’ availability for potential customers’ new subscriptions. With dynamic plan control, the service provider can adjust data network utilization and achieve high customer satisfaction and a low churn rate, which reflect high service supply chain performance. To find the optimal control policy, we transform the high-dimensional dynamic programming problem into an equivalent mixed integer linear programming problem. We find that dynamic plan control is an effective tool for managing demand and increasing revenue in the long term. Numerical evaluation with a large European mobile service provider further supports our conclusion. Furthermore, when network capacity or potential customers’ willingness to join the network changes, the dynamic plan control method generates robust revenue for the service provider.

Recent evidence suggests that increasing overall service coverage and promoting access to telecommunications services have a high economic benefit. Overall, it is estimated that a ten percent increase in mobile telephony penetration could increase economic growth by 0.81 percent in developing countries, whereas a ten percent increase in broadband penetration could increase economic growth by 1.4 percent. In rural and low-income areas in particular, not only do basic telephony services and broadband access allow population to connect with relatives and friends, but they have also introduced a dramatic increase in productivity and in many cases have become the only way for small and medium enterprises in rural areas to access national and, in some cases, global markets. Moreover, the impact of access to telecommunications in rural areas on health, education, disaster management, and local governments has allowed better and more rapid responses, improved coordination, and more effective public management. It is therefore worthwhile to take a second look at all possible policy options, both conventional mechanisms (some of which underutilized) as well as new approaches, to determine whether some of them may be relevant for the emerging agenda of universal broadband access. This paper will first address the necessary conditions required to adopt a more ambitious universal access policy in developing countries. After that, a brief account of the main relevant trends in the industry will be made, followed by a description of twelve different mechanisms for project implementation and six different mechanisms for funding of universal access strategies. Then, an evaluation of the mechanisms will be carried out to identify the most suitable ones. Finally, some recommendations to policy makers on implementation of the preferred mechanisms are also drawn from the analysis.

This Little Data Book presents at-a-glance tables for over 140 economies showing the most recent national data on key indicators of information and communications technology (ICT), including access, quality, affordability, efficiency,sustainability, and applications.

Not content with dominating IPOs on Wall Street, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are taking their can-do, failure-conquering, technology-enabled tactics to the challenge of global poverty. In a 2003 speech, Kofi Annan, then UN secretary-general, challenged Silicon Valley's tycoons to look abroad, daring the valley to \"bring more of its remarkable dynamism and innovation to the developing world.\" California moguls old and new have risen to the challenge. The most famous of these techno-philanthropists, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and his wife, Melinda, commit jaw-dropping sums of cash each year, backed up by the best science that money can buy, in a business-like effort to eradicate polio and river blindness, and to raise small farmers' incomes in Africa and South Asia. Technology, of course, has already made a huge difference in the quality of life of many of the world's poorest people. The tech gurus, like so many evangelists of earlier eras, are wildly overoptimistic about what their gadgets can accomplish in the world's poorest places. Adapted from the source document.

Setting aside questions as to which deaths count in the infant-mortality statistic- U.S. medicine makes extraordinary attempts to save low-birth-weight babies that would otherwise be deemed miscarriages- and the far higher mortality of birthing mothers in Cuba, just one adjustment is provocative: the rate for Cubans living in the U.S. is 4.2. Earlier this month, the UK- which took an ax to British Telecom, severing its local phone lines so as to create a heavily regulated platform (OpenReach) to host rival Internet service providers- was found to be floundering. According to an international survey analyzing 24 million data downloads for speed and quality, Oxford University's Said School of Business found England in 25th place of 66 countries evaluated, badly trailing the U.S. The grim conclusion: \"Study finds UK broadband lagging behind.\"

This study analyzes the extent of knowledge and technology absorption for firms in Europe and Central Asia (ECA), as well as the factors that influence absorption, using statistical analyses of various data sources, including the World Bank enterprise surveys, patent databases maintained by the United States (U.S.) and European patent offices, and case studies. The study addresses the following issues: (i) what can we learn from patents and patent citations about international knowledge flows and cross-national technological cooperation in ECA? (ii) How does openness to trade, participation in global supply networks, and investment in human capital, via on-the-job training, enhance knowledge and technology absorption in ECA-region manufacturing firms? How does foreign direct investment (FDI) stimulate acquisition of managerial and technical skills, new machinery and equipment, and market development?