The following study about the economic performance of the Johannesburg’s small Internet service providers investigates the economic performance of the small Internet providers against the backdrop of regulatory conditions. The study departs from the view point that reports about previous studies have not given particular attention to the economic performance of the small Internet service providers and other impacting factors. The study employed the qualitative research approach with an aim of obtaining deeper understanding and internal view as reiterated by the respondents. The analysis presented follows a guide by Neuman (2006) which departs from the premises of themes or concepts. The results of this study provide a perspective of respondents and the conclusions drawn by the researcher. The study ends by providing suggestions and recommendations for future studies. Suggestions and recommendations provided at the end have been prompted by the results and experiences encountered during the study. / M.A. (Communication Science)

This study analyses the nature and implementation of electronic commerce in order to identify possible problems for taxation and pinpoint those problems which may be relevant to South Africa. Solutions suggested by certain countries and institutions are evaluated for possible implementation in South Africa. The study suggests that although current taxation legislation in South Africa is apP'icable to electronic commerce transactions it is not sufficient to cater effectively for this type of business. The conclusion reached Is that international co-operation is essential in finding solutions. A number of recommendations are made regarding aspects of South African taxation legislation which need to be clarified through policy decisions. Title of / Taxation / M.Comm.

Theoretical section defines the concept of direct selling, describes its history and current development in the world and in the Czech Republic. It further addresses its advantages and organizations which determine international rules and ethical standards of direct selling. The practical part focuses on direct selling of telecommunications services. First, it analyzes development of telecommunication market in years 2007-2011. Based on this analysis, it presents strategy of building a data network of local Internet service provider PJcomp Ltd. in the same period. It describes pricing and practices in direct selling of internet connection. It further addresses the negotiating tactics towards residential houses, developers and suppliers of IT services. The conclusion is based on SWOT analysis and proposes a new corporate strategy.

<p>The objective of this thesis is to design and implement a small scaleInternet Service Provider (ISP) for the NetCenter sub department atMälardalen University. The ISP is intended to give NetCenter a networkseparate from the University’s network, providing them with a moreflexible environment for lab purposes. This will give their students anopportunity to experience a larger backbone with Internet accessibility,which has not been previously available. At the same time it will place theteachers in control of the network in the NetCenter lab premises.The network is designed with a layered approach including an Internetaccess layer, a larger core segment and a distribution layer with aseparated lab network. It also incorporates both a public and a privateserver network, housing servers running e.g. Windows Active Directory,external DNS services, monitoring tools and logging applications. TheInternet access is achieved by peering with SUNET providing a full BGPfeed.This thesis report presents methods, implementations and results involvedin successfully creating the NetCenter ISP as both a lab network and anInternet provider with a few inevitable shortcomings; the most prominentbeing an incomplete Windows Domain setup.</p>

The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is the dominant transport protocol in today?s Internet. The original design of TCP left congestion control open to future designers. Short of implementing changes to the TCP stack on the end-nodes themselves, Internet Service Providers have employed several techniques to be able to operate their network equipment efficiently. These techniques amount to shaping traffic to reduce cost and improve overall customer satisfaction. <br /><br /> The method that gives maximum control when performing traffic shaping is using an inline traffic shaper. An inline traffic shaper sits in the middle of any flow, allowing packets to pass through it and, with policy-limited freedom, inspects and modifies all packets as it pleases. However, a number of practical issues such as hardware reliability or ISP policy, may prevent such a solution from being employed. For example, an ISP that does not fully trust the quality of the traffic shaper would not want such a product to be placed in-line with its equipment, as it places a significant threat to its business. What is required in such cases is third-party rate control. <br /><br /> Formally defined, a third-party rate controller is one that can see all traffic and inject new traffic into the network, but cannot remove or modify existing network packets. Given these restrictions, we present and study a technique to control TCP flows, namely triple-ACK duplication. The triple-ACK algorithm allows significant capabilities to a third-party traffic shaper. We provide an analytical justification for why this technique works under ideal conditions and demonstrate via simulation the bandwidth reduction achieved. When judiciously applied, the triple-ACK duplication technique produces minimal badput, while producing significant reductions in bandwidth consumption under ideal conditions. Based on a brief study, we show that our algorithm is able to selectively throttle one flow while allowing another to gain in bandwidth.

The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is the dominant transport protocol in today?s Internet. The original design of TCP left congestion control open to future designers. Short of implementing changes to the TCP stack on the end-nodes themselves, Internet Service Providers have employed several techniques to be able to operate their network equipment efficiently. These techniques amount to shaping traffic to reduce cost and improve overall customer satisfaction. <br /><br /> The method that gives maximum control when performing traffic shaping is using an inline traffic shaper. An inline traffic shaper sits in the middle of any flow, allowing packets to pass through it and, with policy-limited freedom, inspects and modifies all packets as it pleases. However, a number of practical issues such as hardware reliability or ISP policy, may prevent such a solution from being employed. For example, an ISP that does not fully trust the quality of the traffic shaper would not want such a product to be placed in-line with its equipment, as it places a significant threat to its business. What is required in such cases is third-party rate control. <br /><br /> Formally defined, a third-party rate controller is one that can see all traffic and inject new traffic into the network, but cannot remove or modify existing network packets. Given these restrictions, we present and study a technique to control TCP flows, namely triple-ACK duplication. The triple-ACK algorithm allows significant capabilities to a third-party traffic shaper. We provide an analytical justification for why this technique works under ideal conditions and demonstrate via simulation the bandwidth reduction achieved. When judiciously applied, the triple-ACK duplication technique produces minimal badput, while producing significant reductions in bandwidth consumption under ideal conditions. Based on a brief study, we show that our algorithm is able to selectively throttle one flow while allowing another to gain in bandwidth.

Multicast has long been considered an attractive service for the Internet for the provision of multiparty applications. For over a decade now multicast has been a proposed IETF standard. Though there is a strong industry push towards deploying multicast, there has been little multicast deployment by commercial Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and more importantly most end-users still lack multicast capabilities. Depending on the underlying network infrastructure, the ISP has several options of implementing his multicast capabilities. With significantly faster and more sophisticated protocols being designed and prototyped, it is expected that a whole new gamut of applications that are delay sensitive will come into being. However, the incentives to resolve the conflicting interests of the ISPs and the end-users have to be provided for successful implementation of these protocols. Thus we arrive at the following economic questions: What is the strategy that will enable the ISP recover his costs ? How can the end-user be made aware of the cost of his actions ? Naturally, the strategies of the ISP and the end-user depend on each other and form an economic game. The research problems addressed in this thesis are: A pricing model that is independent of the underlying transmission protocols is prefered. We have proposed such a pricing scheme for multicast independent of the underlying protocols, by introducing the concept of pricing points* These pricing points provide a range of prices that the users can expect during a particular time period and tune their usage accordingly. Our pricing scheme makes both the sender and receiver accountable. Our scheme also provides for catering to heterogeneous users and gives incentive for differential pricing. We explore a number of formulations of resource allocation problems arising in communication networks as optimization models. Optimization-based methods were only employed for unicast congestion control. We have extended this method for single rate multicast. We have also devised an optimization-based approach for multicast congestion control that finds an allocation rate to maximize the social welfare. Finally we also show that the session-splitting problem can also be cast as an optimization problem. The commonly used "max-min" fairness criteria suffers from serious limitations like discriminating sessions that traverse large number of links and poor network utilization. We provide an allocation scheme that reduces discrimination towards multicast sessions that traverse many links and also improves network utilization.

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This study analyses the nature and implementation of electronic commerce in order to identify possible problems for taxation and pinpoint those problems which may be relevant to South Africa. Solutions suggested by certain countries and institutions are evaluated for possible implementation in South Africa. The study suggests that although current taxation legislation in South Africa is apP'icable to electronic commerce transactions it is not sufficient to cater effectively for this type of business. The conclusion reached Is that international co-operation is essential in finding solutions. A number of recommendations are made regarding aspects of South African taxation legislation which need to be clarified through policy decisions. Title of / Taxation / M.Comm.

The following study about the economic performance of the Johannesburg’s small Internet service providers investigates the economic performance of the small Internet providers against the backdrop of regulatory conditions. The study departs from the view point that reports about previous studies have not given particular attention to the economic performance of the small Internet service providers and other impacting factors. The study employed the qualitative research approach with an aim of obtaining deeper understanding and internal view as reiterated by the respondents. The analysis presented follows a guide by Neuman (2006) which departs from the premises of themes or concepts. The results of this study provide a perspective of respondents and the conclusions drawn by the researcher. The study ends by providing suggestions and recommendations for future studies. Suggestions and recommendations provided at the end have been prompted by the results and experiences encountered during the study. / M.A. (Communication Science)