Российский рынок телекоммуникаций находится в поиске новых направлений развития, включая партнёрства. Целью магистерской диссертации является разработка и апробация экономической модели распределения партнёрских услуг на примере телекоммуникационного оператора. Анализ основывался на изучении научно-периодической литературы, изучении существующих особенностей телекоммуникационных услуги и специфики распределения услуг. В качестве источников информации использовались нормативно-правовые акты, база публикаций Российского индекса научного цитирования, представленная на ресурсе Elibrary, данные корпоративной статистики по тематике исследования, данные управленческой отчетности и внутренние документы исследуемого предприятия. В ходе написания магистерской диссертации была разработана и апробирована модель распределения партнёрских услуг на примере телекоммуникационного оператора. Использование разработанной модели нацелено на повышение эффективности взаимодействия клиентов, телекоммуникационного оператора и его партнёров. / The purpose of the master's thesis is to develop and test the economic model of distribution of partner services on the example of a telecommunications operator. The analysis was based on the study of scientific and periodical literature, the study of the existing features of telecommunication services and the specifics of the distribution of services. As sources of information we were used legal acts, the database of publications of the Russian Science Citation Index, presented on the Elibrary resource, corporate statistics on the subject of research, management reporting data and internal documents of the enterprise under study. During the work there were developed and tested the model of distribution of partner services on the example of the telecommunications operator. The use of the developed model is aimed at improving the efficiency of interaction between customers, telecommunications operator and its partners.

Neighbourhood councils are sub-municipal committees which operate within a geographically delimited area of a municipality or a municipal department. Their activities cover a single established policy area such as social services (single functioned committee) or several areas such as education, leisure, and social issues (multi-functioned committee). The thesis includes a comparative analysis of the origin, occurance, and performance of multi-functioned neighbourhood councils in Finland, Norway, and Sweden during the period 1968-1986. In the case of Denmark, the debate is analyzed and the question posed as to why neighbourhood councils were not introduced during this period.It is the interplay between a number of factors which determines how and why neighbourhood councils occur and in some cases endure and are developed further. The countries' traditions and characteristics - such as the size of the public sector and local government's share of it, size of municipalities, and political culture - are important in this context. Increased democracy and greater effectivity were the main aims of the reform and these have been achieved to some extent. The occurance of neighbourhood councils also means that participation, recruitment, articulation of demands, and communication between elector and elected are changed and somewhat improved. Where neighbourhood councils exist, greater consideration is given to geographical (rather than departmental) principles in the distribution and redistribution of services and welfare. Neighbourhood councils are clearly a source of further variation between and within the Nordic countries. It is, however, too early to judge whether the variation within countries will develop into inappropriate deviations from the principal of equal services for all or if they, on the contrary, are indications of greater future responsiveness. / digitalisering@umu

This research was initiated due to declining customer satisfaction indices in the Southern region of Eskom, an electricity utility in South Africa. Given the link between customer satisfaction and purchase intentions, the sustainability of the business is at stake. The validity of the current MaxiCare survey tool is questioned and explored, as is the congruence of management and customers' perceptions regarding the key service quality constructs in the industry. The study's objective was to provide management with a reliable and valid customer satisfaction survey instrument as an alternate to the existing tool and to use the knowledge gained through the research process to recommend improvement strategies aimed at closing specific satisfaction gaps identified. The research was performed in two stages; firstly, semistructured interviews with customers and management to gain an understanding of the most important satisfaction dimensions. These influenced the design of a survey instrument based largely on the SERVPERF tool with the inclusion of importance ratings per item in the second stage. The quantitative survey results were used to assess the reliability and validity of the research and to suggest areas for future work. The results show that communication, quality of supply, assurance and price are uppermost in the consumer's mind. Tangibles are not significant and the inclusion of empathy is inconclusive. Management and customer perceptions at a macro level are closely aligned, however the two populations are not in agreement as to the underlying micro considerations. Similarly, the MaxiCare instrument is found to be valid as a macro indicator but lacks sufficient detail to be useful as a strategic tool and needs to be supplemented with additional sources of market information. The survey instrument used in the second phase is both descriptive and reliable but the number of factors it measures, the mix of items and the inclusion of the 'importance' dimension need further refinement to improve its validity. Future revisions of the tool will provide management with specific information that allows them to focus improvement strategies on disgruntled customers and their key service issues.

La généralisation de l’usage de l’Internet, ces dernières années, a été marquée par deux tendances importantes. Nous citerons en premier, l’enthousiasme de plus en plus grand des utilisateurs pour les services médias. Cette tendance est particulièrement accentuée par l’avènement des contenus générés par les utilisateurs qui amènent dans les catalogues des fournisseurs de services un choix illimité de contenus. L’autre tendance est la diversification et l’hétérogénéité en ressources des terminaux et réseaux d’accès. Seule la valeur du service lui-même compte aujourd’hui pour les utilisateurs et non le moyen d’y accéder. Cependant, offrir aux utilisateurs un accès ubiquitaire à de plus en plus de services Internet, impose des exigences très rigoureuses sur l’infrastructure actuelle de l’Internet. En effet, L’évolution de l’Internet devient aujourd’hui une évidence et cette évolution est d’autant plus nécessaire dans un contexte de services multimédias qui sont connus pour leur sensibilité au contexte dans lequel ils sont consommés et pour générer d’énormes quantités de trafic. Dans le cadre de cette thèse, nous nous focalisons sur deux enjeux importants dans l’évolution de l’Internet. A savoir, faciliter le déploiement de services médias personnalisés et adaptatifs et améliorer les plateformes de distribution de ces derniers afin de permettre leur passage à l’échelle tout en gardant la qualité de service à un niveau satisfaisant pour les utilisateurs finaux. Afin de permettre ceci, nous introduisons en premier, une nouvelle architecture multi environnements et multi couches permettant un environnement collaboratif pour le partage et la consommation des services médias dans un cadre des réseaux média du futur. Puis, nous proposons deux contributions majeures que nous déployons sur la couche virtuelle formés par les Home-Boxes (passerelles résidentielles évoluées) introduite dans l’architecture précédente. Dans notre première contribution, nous proposons un environnement permettant le déploiement à grande échelle de services sensibles au contexte. Deux approches ont été considérées dans la modélisation et la gestion du contexte. La première approche est basée sur les langages de balisage afin de permettre un traitement du contexte plus léger et par conséquent des temps de réponse très petits. La seconde approche, quant à elle est basée sur les ontologies et les règles afin de permettre plus d’expressivité et un meilleur partage et réutilisation des informations de contexte. Les ontologies étant connues pour leur complexité, le but de cette proposition et de prouver la faisabilité d’une telle approche dans un contexte de services multimédias par des moyen de distribution de la gestion du contexte. Concernant notre deuxième contribution, l’idée et de tirer profit des ressources (disque et connectivité) des Home-Boxes déjà déployées, afin d’améliorer les plateformes de distribution des services médias et d’améliorer ainsi le passage à l’échelle, la performance et la fiabilité de ces derniers et ce, à moindre coût. Pour cela, nous proposons deux solutions pour deux problèmes communément traités dans la réplication des contenus : (1) la redirection de requêtes pour laquelle nous proposons un algorithme de sélection à deux niveaux de filtrage, un premier filtrage basé sur les règles afin de personnaliser les services en fonction du contexte de leur consommation suivi d’un filtrage basé sur des métriques réseaux (charges des serveurs et délais entre les serveurs et les clients) ; et (2) le placement et la distribution des contenus sur les caches pour lesquels on a proposé une stratégie de mise en cache online, basée sur la popularité des contenus. / Users’ willingness to consume media services along with the compelling proliferation of mobile devices interconnected via multiple wired and wireless networking technologies place high requirements on the Future Internet. It is a common belief today that Internet should evolve towards providing end users with ubiquitous and high quality media services and this, in a scalable, reliable, efficient and interoperable way. However, enabling such a seamless media delivery raises a number of challenges. On one hand, services should be more context-aware to enable their delivery to a large and disparate computational context. On another hand, current Internet media delivery infrastructures need to scale in order to meet the continuously growing number of users while keeping quality at a satisfying level. In this context, we introduce a novel architecture, enabling a novel collaborative framework for sharing and consuming Media Services within Future Internet (FI). The introduced architecture comprises a number of environments and layers aiming to improve today’s media delivery networks and systems towards a better user experience. In this thesis, we are particulary interested in enabling context-aware multimedia services provisioning that meets on one hand, the users expectations and needs and on another hand, the exponentially growing users’ demand experienced by these services. Two major and demanding challenges are then faced in this thesis (1) the design of a context-awareness framework that allows adaptive multimedia services provisioning and, (2) the enhancement of the media delivery platform to support large-scale media services. The proposed solutions are built on the newly introduced virtual Home-Box layer in the latter proposed architecture.First, in order to achieve context-awareness, two types of frameworks are proposed based on the two main models for context representation. The markup schemes-based framework aims to achieve light weight context management to ensure performance in term of responsiveness. The second framework uses ontology and rules to model and manage context. The aim is to allow higher formality and better expressiveness and sharing. However, ontology is known to be complex and thus difficult to scale. The aim of our work is then to prove the feasibility of such a solution in the field of multimedia services provisioning when the context management is distributed among the Home-Box layer. Concerning the media services delivery enhancement, the idea is to leverage the participating and already deployed Home-Boxes disk storage and uploading capabilities to achieve service performance, scalability and reliability. Towards this, we have addressed two issues that are commonly induced by the content replication: (1) the server selection for which we have proposed a two-level anycast-based request redirection strategy that consists in a preliminary filtering based on the clients’ contexts and in a second stage provides accurate network distance information, using not only the end-to-end delay metric but also the servers’ load one and, (2) the content placement and replacement in cache for which we have designed an adaptive online popularity-based video caching strategy among the introduced HB overlay.

[Abstract - Conclusion]: This research study confirms the theory in the literature review on delivery of quality service to customers and premise that there is a statistically significant difference between Eskom service as perceived by rural prepaid household customers and their expectations. This study also highlights the need for Eskom management to take into cognisance the unique rural prepaid customer service needs and how to meet them, perhaps a differentiated service approach rather than a one-strategy-fits-all approach. This is in view of gaps created between expectations and perceptions of service, especially in the reliability dimension that could require a concentrated or changed performance approach to close them.