Academic literature on the topic 'Cell phone services industry – South Africa – Pretoria'

The study explores the delight phenomenon by investigating customer delight, its antecedents and its postcedents in the cell phone industry of South Africa. Data was collected from 450 customers of cell phone companies who considered themselves satisfied overall with their cellular service provider. This study extends the model proposed by Roberts-Lombard and Petzer (2018) and attempts to substantiate their findings in South Africa through applying the extended model in a parallel industry context. The results indicate that perceived employee service delivery skills and perceived value are important antecedents of customer delight and that there is a meaningful relationship between customer delight and customer loyalty in a business-to-consumer (B2C) setting in South Africa. The study adds value by informing cellular service providers how the service delivery ability of employees and the value perception of customers influence their customer delight experience and ultimately their loyalty to the service provider.

When George Orwell encountered ideas of a technological utopia sixty-five years ago, he acted the grumpy middle-aged man Reading recently a batch of rather shallowly optimistic “progressive” books, I was struck by the automatic way in which people go on repeating certain phrases which were fashionable before 1914. Two great favourites are “the abolition of distance” and “the disappearance of frontiers”. I do not know how often I have met with the statements that “the aeroplane and the radio have abolished distance” and “all parts of the world are now interdependent” (1944). It is worth revisiting the old boy’s grumpiness, because the rhetoric he so niftily skewers continues in our own time. Facebook features “Peace on Facebook” and even claims that it can “decrease world conflict” through inter-cultural communication. Twitter has announced itself as “a triumph of humanity” (“A Cyber-House” 61). Queue George. In between Orwell and latter-day hoody cybertarians, a whole host of excitable public intellectuals announced the impending end of materiality through emergent media forms. Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, Daniel Bell, Ithiel de Sola Pool, George Gilder, Alvin Toffler—the list of 1960s futurists goes on and on. And this wasn’t just a matter of punditry: the OECD decreed the coming of the “information society” in 1975 and the European Union (EU) followed suit in 1979, while IBM merrily declared an “information age” in 1977. Bell theorized this technological utopia as post-ideological, because class would cease to matter (Mattelart). Polluting industries seemingly no longer represented the dynamic core of industrial capitalism; instead, market dynamism radiated from a networked, intellectual core of creative and informational activities. The new information and knowledge-based economies would rescue First World hegemony from an “insurgent world” that lurked within as well as beyond itself (Schiller). Orwell’s others and the Cold-War futurists propagated one of the most destructive myths shaping both public debate and scholarly studies of the media, culture, and communication. They convinced generations of analysts, activists, and arrivistes that the promises and problems of the media could be understood via metaphors of the environment, and that the media were weightless and virtual. The famous medium they wished us to see as the message —a substance as vital to our wellbeing as air, water, and soil—turned out to be no such thing. Today’s cybertarians inherit their anti-Marxist, anti-materialist positions, as a casual glance at any new media journal, culture-industry magazine, or bourgeois press outlet discloses. The media are undoubtedly important instruments of social cohesion and fragmentation, political power and dissent, democracy and demagoguery, and other fraught extensions of human consciousness. But talk of media systems as equivalent to physical ecosystems—fashionable among marketers and media scholars alike—is predicated on the notion that they are environmentally benign technologies. This has never been true, from the beginnings of print to today’s cloud-covered computing. Our new book Greening the Media focuses on the environmental impact of the media—the myriad ways that media technology consumes, despoils, and wastes natural resources. We introduce ideas, stories, and facts that have been marginal or absent from popular, academic, and professional histories of media technology. Throughout, ecological issues have been at the core of our work and we immodestly think the same should apply to media communications, and cultural studies more generally. We recognize that those fields have contributed valuable research and teaching that address environmental questions. For instance, there is an abundant literature on representations of the environment in cinema, how to communicate environmental messages successfully, and press coverage of climate change. That’s not enough. You may already know that media technologies contain toxic substances. You may have signed an on-line petition protesting the hazardous and oppressive conditions under which workers assemble cell phones and computers. But you may be startled, as we were, by the scale and pervasiveness of these environmental risks. They are present in and around every site where electronic and electric devices are manufactured, used, and thrown away, poisoning humans, animals, vegetation, soil, air and water. We are using the term “media” as a portmanteau word to cover a multitude of cultural and communications machines and processes—print, film, radio, television, information and communications technologies (ICT), and consumer electronics (CE). This is not only for analytical convenience, but because there is increasing overlap between the sectors. CE connect to ICT and vice versa; televisions resemble computers; books are read on telephones; newspapers are written through clouds; and so on. Cultural forms and gadgets that were once separate are now linked. The currently fashionable notion of convergence doesn’t quite capture the vastness of this integration, which includes any object with a circuit board, scores of accessories that plug into it, and a global nexus of labor and environmental inputs and effects that produce and flow from it. In 2007, a combination of ICT/CE and media production accounted for between 2 and 3 percent of all greenhouse gases emitted around the world (“Gartner Estimates,”; International Telecommunication Union; Malmodin et al.). Between twenty and fifty million tonnes of electronic waste (e-waste) are generated annually, much of it via discarded cell phones and computers, which affluent populations throw out regularly in order to buy replacements. (Presumably this fits the narcissism of small differences that distinguishes them from their own past.) E-waste is historically produced in the Global North—Australasia, Western Europe, Japan, and the US—and dumped in the Global South—Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe, Southern and Southeast Asia, and China. It takes the form of a thousand different, often deadly, materials for each electrical and electronic gadget. This trend is changing as India and China generate their own media detritus (Robinson; Herat). Enclosed hard drives, backlit screens, cathode ray tubes, wiring, capacitors, and heavy metals pose few risks while these materials remain encased. But once discarded and dismantled, ICT/CE have the potential to expose workers and ecosystems to a morass of toxic components. Theoretically, “outmoded” parts could be reused or swapped for newer parts to refurbish devices. But items that are defined as waste undergo further destruction in order to collect remaining parts and valuable metals, such as gold, silver, copper, and rare-earth elements. This process causes serious health risks to bones, brains, stomachs, lungs, and other vital organs, in addition to birth defects and disrupted biological development in children. Medical catastrophes can result from lead, cadmium, mercury, other heavy metals, poisonous fumes emitted in search of precious metals, and such carcinogenic compounds as polychlorinated biphenyls, dioxin, polyvinyl chloride, and flame retardants (Maxwell and Miller 13). The United States’ Environmental Protection Agency estimates that by 2007 US residents owned approximately three billion electronic devices, with an annual turnover rate of 400 million units, and well over half such purchases made by women. Overall CE ownership varied with age—adults under 45 typically boasted four gadgets; those over 65 made do with one. The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) says US$145 billion was expended in the sector in 2006 in the US alone, up 13% on the previous year. The CEA refers joyously to a “consumer love affair with technology continuing at a healthy clip.” In the midst of a recession, 2009 saw $165 billion in sales, and households owned between fifteen and twenty-four gadgets on average. By 2010, US$233 billion was spent on electronic products, three-quarters of the population owned a computer, nearly half of all US adults owned an MP3 player, and 85% had a cell phone. By all measures, the amount of ICT/CE on the planet is staggering. As investigative science journalist, Elizabeth Grossman put it: “no industry pushes products into the global market on the scale that high-tech electronics does” (Maxwell and Miller 2). In 2007, “of the 2.25 million tons of TVs, cell phones and computer products ready for end-of-life management, 18% (414,000 tons) was collected for recycling and 82% (1.84 million tons) was disposed of, primarily in landfill” (Environmental Protection Agency 1). Twenty million computers fell obsolete across the US in 1998, and the rate was 130,000 a day by 2005. It has been estimated that the five hundred million personal computers discarded in the US between 1997 and 2007 contained 6.32 billion pounds of plastics, 1.58 billion pounds of lead, three million pounds of cadmium, 1.9 million pounds of chromium, and 632000 pounds of mercury (Environmental Protection Agency; Basel Action Network and Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition 6). The European Union is expected to generate upwards of twelve million tons annually by 2020 (Commission of the European Communities 17). While refrigerators and dangerous refrigerants account for the bulk of EU e-waste, about 44% of the most toxic e-waste measured in 2005 came from medium-to-small ICT/CE: computer monitors, TVs, printers, ink cartridges, telecommunications equipment, toys, tools, and anything with a circuit board (Commission of the European Communities 31-34). Understanding the enormity of the environmental problems caused by making, using, and disposing of media technologies should arrest our enthusiasm for them. But intellectual correctives to the “love affair” with technology, or technophilia, have come and gone without establishing much of a foothold against the breathtaking flood of gadgets and the propaganda that proclaims their awe-inspiring capabilities.[i] There is a peculiar enchantment with the seeming magic of wireless communication, touch-screen phones and tablets, flat-screen high-definition televisions, 3-D IMAX cinema, mobile computing, and so on—a totemic, quasi-sacred power that the historian of technology David Nye has named the technological sublime (Nye Technological Sublime 297).[ii] We demonstrate in our book why there is no place for the technological sublime in projects to green the media. But first we should explain why such symbolic power does not accrue to more mundane technologies; after all, for the time-strapped cook, a pressure cooker does truly magical things. Three important qualities endow ICT/CE with unique symbolic potency—virtuality, volume, and novelty. The technological sublime of media technology is reinforced by the “virtual nature of much of the industry’s content,” which “tends to obscure their responsibility for a vast proliferation of hardware, all with high levels of built-in obsolescence and decreasing levels of efficiency” (Boyce and Lewis 5). Planned obsolescence entered the lexicon as a new “ethics” for electrical engineering in the 1920s and ’30s, when marketers, eager to “habituate people to buying new products,” called for designs to become quickly obsolete “in efficiency, economy, style, or taste” (Grossman 7-8).[iii] This defines the short lifespan deliberately constructed for computer systems (drives, interfaces, operating systems, batteries, etc.) by making tiny improvements incompatible with existing hardware (Science and Technology Council of the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences 33-50; Boyce and Lewis). With planned obsolescence leading to “dizzying new heights” of product replacement (Rogers 202), there is an overstated sense of the novelty and preeminence of “new” media—a “cult of the present” is particularly dazzled by the spread of electronic gadgets through globalization (Mattelart and Constantinou 22). References to the symbolic power of media technology can be found in hymnals across the internet and the halls of academe: technologies change us, the media will solve social problems or create new ones, ICTs transform work, monopoly ownership no longer matters, journalism is dead, social networking enables social revolution, and the media deliver a cleaner, post-industrial, capitalism. Here is a typical example from the twilight zone of the technological sublime (actually, the OECD): A major feature of the knowledge-based economy is the impact that ICTs have had on industrial structure, with a rapid growth of services and a relative decline of manufacturing. Services are typically less energy intensive and less polluting, so among those countries with a high and increasing share of services, we often see a declining energy intensity of production … with the emergence of the Knowledge Economy ending the old linear relationship between output and energy use (i.e. partially de-coupling growth and energy use) (Houghton 1) This statement mixes half-truths and nonsense. In reality, old-time, toxic manufacturing has moved to the Global South, where it is ascendant; pollution levels are rising worldwide; and energy consumption is accelerating in residential and institutional sectors, due almost entirely to ICT/CE usage, despite advances in energy conservation technology (a neat instance of the age-old Jevons Paradox). In our book we show how these are all outcomes of growth in ICT/CE, the foundation of the so-called knowledge-based economy. ICT/CE are misleadingly presented as having little or no material ecological impact. In the realm of everyday life, the sublime experience of electronic machinery conceals the physical work and material resources that go into them, while the technological sublime makes the idea that more-is-better palatable, axiomatic; even sexy. In this sense, the technological sublime relates to what Marx called “the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour” once they are in the hands of the consumer, who lusts after them as if they were “independent beings” (77). There is a direct but unseen relationship between technology’s symbolic power and the scale of its environmental impact, which the economist Juliet Schor refers to as a “materiality paradox” —the greater the frenzy to buy goods for their transcendent or nonmaterial cultural meaning, the greater the use of material resources (40-41). We wrote Greening the Media knowing that a study of the media’s effect on the environment must work especially hard to break the enchantment that inflames popular and elite passions for media technologies. We understand that the mere mention of the political-economic arrangements that make shiny gadgets possible, or the environmental consequences of their appearance and disappearance, is bad medicine. It’s an unwelcome buzz kill—not a cool way to converse about cool stuff. But we didn’t write the book expecting to win many allies among high-tech enthusiasts and ICT/CE industry leaders. We do not dispute the importance of information and communication media in our lives and modern social systems. We are media people by profession and personal choice, and deeply immersed in the study and use of emerging media technologies. But we think it’s time for a balanced assessment with less hype and more practical understanding of the relationship of media technologies to the biosphere they inhabit. Media consumers, designers, producers, activists, researchers, and policy makers must find new and effective ways to move ICT/CE production and consumption toward ecologically sound practices. In the course of this project, we found in casual conversation, lecture halls, classroom discussions, and correspondence, consistent and increasing concern with the environmental impact of media technology, especially the deleterious effects of e-waste toxins on workers, air, water, and soil. We have learned that the grip of the technological sublime is not ironclad. Its instability provides a point of departure for investigating and criticizing the relationship between the media and the environment. The media are, and have been for a long time, intimate environmental participants. Media technologies are yesterday’s, today’s, and tomorrow’s news, but rarely in the way they should be. The prevailing myth is that the printing press, telegraph, phonograph, photograph, cinema, telephone, wireless radio, television, and internet changed the world without changing the Earth. In reality, each technology has emerged by despoiling ecosystems and exposing workers to harmful environments, a truth obscured by symbolic power and the power of moguls to set the terms by which such technologies are designed and deployed. Those who benefit from ideas of growth, progress, and convergence, who profit from high-tech innovation, monopoly, and state collusion—the military-industrial-entertainment-academic complex and multinational commandants of labor—have for too long ripped off the Earth and workers. As the current celebration of media technology inevitably winds down, perhaps it will become easier to comprehend that digital wonders come at the expense of employees and ecosystems. This will return us to Max Weber’s insistence that we understand technology in a mundane way as a “mode of processing material goods” (27). Further to understanding that ordinariness, we can turn to the pioneering conversation analyst Harvey Sacks, who noted three decades ago “the failures of technocratic dreams [:] that if only we introduced some fantastic new communication machine the world will be transformed.” Such fantasies derived from the very banality of these introductions—that every time they took place, one more “technical apparatus” was simply “being made at home with the rest of our world’ (548). Media studies can join in this repetitive banality. Or it can withdraw the welcome mat for media technologies that despoil the Earth and wreck the lives of those who make them. In our view, it’s time to green the media by greening media studies. References “A Cyber-House Divided.” Economist 4 Sep. 2010: 61-62. “Gartner Estimates ICT Industry Accounts for 2 Percent of Global CO2 Emissions.” Gartner press release. 6 April 2007. ‹http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=503867›. Basel Action Network and Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition. Exporting Harm: The High-Tech Trashing of Asia. Seattle: Basel Action Network, 25 Feb. 2002. Benjamin, Walter. “Central Park.” Trans. Lloyd Spencer with Mark Harrington. New German Critique 34 (1985): 32-58. Biagioli, Mario. “Postdisciplinary Liaisons: Science Studies and the Humanities.” Critical Inquiry 35.4 (2009): 816-33. Boyce, Tammy and Justin Lewis, eds. Climate Change and the Media. New York: Peter Lang, 2009. Commission of the European Communities. “Impact Assessment.” Commission Staff Working Paper accompanying the Proposal for a Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council on Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) (recast). COM (2008) 810 Final. Brussels: Commission of the European Communities, 3 Dec. 2008. Environmental Protection Agency. Management of Electronic Waste in the United States. Washington, DC: EPA, 2007 Environmental Protection Agency. Statistics on the Management of Used and End-of-Life Electronics. Washington, DC: EPA, 2008 Grossman, Elizabeth. Tackling High-Tech Trash: The E-Waste Explosion & What We Can Do about It. New York: Demos, 2008. ‹http://www.demos.org/pubs/e-waste_FINAL.pdf› Herat, Sunil. “Review: Sustainable Management of Electronic Waste (e-Waste).” Clean 35.4 (2007): 305-10. Houghton, J. “ICT and the Environment in Developing Countries: Opportunities and Developments.” Paper prepared for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2009. International Telecommunication Union. ICTs for Environment: Guidelines for Developing Countries, with a Focus on Climate Change. Geneva: ICT Applications and Cybersecurity Division Policies and Strategies Department ITU Telecommunication Development Sector, 2008. Malmodin, Jens, Åsa Moberg, Dag Lundén, Göran Finnveden, and Nina Lövehagen. “Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Operational Electricity Use in the ICT and Entertainment & Media Sectors.” Journal of Industrial Ecology 14.5 (2010): 770-90. Marx, Karl. Capital: Vol. 1: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, 3rd ed. Trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, Ed. Frederick Engels. New York: International Publishers, 1987. Mattelart, Armand and Costas M. Constantinou. “Communications/Excommunications: An Interview with Armand Mattelart.” Trans. Amandine Bled, Jacques Guot, and Costas Constantinou. Review of International Studies 34.1 (2008): 21-42. Mattelart, Armand. “Cómo nació el mito de Internet.” Trans. Yanina Guthman. El mito internet. Ed. Victor Hugo de la Fuente. Santiago: Editorial aún creemos en los sueños, 2002. 25-32. Maxwell, Richard and Toby Miller. Greening the Media. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Nye, David E. American Technological Sublime. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994. Nye, David E. Technology Matters: Questions to Live With. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 2007. Orwell, George. “As I Please.” Tribune. 12 May 1944. Richtel, Matt. “Consumers Hold on to Products Longer.” New York Times: B1, 26 Feb. 2011. Robinson, Brett H. “E-Waste: An Assessment of Global Production and Environmental Impacts.” Science of the Total Environment 408.2 (2009): 183-91. Rogers, Heather. Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage. New York: New Press, 2005. Sacks, Harvey. Lectures on Conversation. Vols. I and II. Ed. Gail Jefferson. Malden: Blackwell, 1995. Schiller, Herbert I. Information and the Crisis Economy. Norwood: Ablex Publishing, 1984. Schor, Juliet B. Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth. New York: Penguin, 2010. Science and Technology Council of the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The Digital Dilemma: Strategic Issues in Archiving and Accessing Digital Motion Picture Materials. Los Angeles: Academy Imprints, 2007. Weber, Max. “Remarks on Technology and Culture.” Trans. Beatrix Zumsteg and Thomas M. Kemple. Ed. Thomas M. Kemple. Theory, Culture [i] The global recession that began in 2007 has been the main reason for some declines in Global North energy consumption, slower turnover in gadget upgrades, and longer periods of consumer maintenance of electronic goods (Richtel). [ii] The emergence of the technological sublime has been attributed to the Western triumphs in the post-Second World War period, when technological power supposedly supplanted the power of nature to inspire fear and astonishment (Nye Technology Matters 28). Historian Mario Biagioli explains how the sublime permeates everyday life through technoscience: "If around 1950 the popular imaginary placed science close to the military and away from the home, today’s technoscience frames our everyday life at all levels, down to our notion of the self" (818). [iii] This compulsory repetition is seemingly undertaken each time as a novelty, governed by what German cultural critic Walter Benjamin called, in his awkward but occasionally illuminating prose, "the ever-always-the-same" of "mass-production" cloaked in "a hitherto unheard-of significance" (48).

While experiencing exponential growth worldwide, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are key factors in business today. The ubiquitous nature of the mobile phone in South Africa and the use of wireless technologies facilitate business in areas where current fixed infrastructure is limited or non-existent, thereby aiding in the development of rural areas. This descriptive study determines what factors will extend the use of mobile phone technology in business. The literature indicates business advantage can be gained from incorporating technology into a strategic framework but in so doing must consider the complexities of the technology and its lifecycle. Currently, e-mail and Internet access would be the most likely applications of data use via Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM). As a technology-based study the methodology used e-mail to deliver a survey targeting staff from the three cellular network operators in Port Elizabeth. The mobile industry and Port Elizabeth were both considered good indicators of technology use and the progression of infrastructure throughout South Africa. The findings indicate that although most mobile phones have the features required by users, the current use of associated data applications is low. Email is the most appropriate application and expected to be significant in 2006. The technology is of strategic importance and can be applied to make idle time productive. Successful use depends on the removal of barriers. In the case of e-mail and Internet access; the most significant of these is the complexity of the initial set-up. Despite the complexity of technology evolution and the challenges of effective business application, substantial gains can be still be realised. Currently, technology is best deployed to meet specialised needs. The expected introduction of third generation technologies herald’s higher data transfer rates, providing the opportunity for more generalised application in business in the immediate future.

The research problem addressed in this study was to develop a marketing plan consisting of selected elements that would give a cellular company like Vodacom a competitive advantage over competitors and to capture a significant market share when marketing mobile data services like 3G. To achieve this object, a literature study to determine the key components of a marketing plan was undertaken and a theoretical model was selected to develop a marketing plan of selected components In addition to the literature study, an empirical study was conducted to identify core concepts critical to the development of a selected element marketing plan to market 3G and re-launch mobile data services. The results of the literature study were combined with the empirical study and a marketing plan based on McDonald was developed. Michael Porter’s five forces model was used as a reference to discuss the competitor analysis, a marketing strategy was compiled with specific referencing to the four P’s of marketing and marketing controls formed the basis of this research. This study concludes with recommendations applicable for the implementation of the marketing plan and options for further research.

M. Tech. Business Administration
The purpose of this study was to identify and understand customer perceptions about service quality (SQ) at a telecommunications retail outlet. The theory of Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry (PZB) known as SERVQUAL was used to give theoretical grounding to the study.

M. Tech. Business Administration
In April 2014, ICASA, South Africa's communications regulator, reduced mobile termination rates (i.e. tariffs mobile service providers can charge for terminating calls on each other's networks) from 40 cents to 20 cents per minute. Furthermore, mobile number portability has enhanced mobility of subscribers across networks. Mobile number portability means that subscribers can switch mobile network service providers without changing their mobile number despite it being issued by the network they are leaving. The price war amongst service providers means that all mobile network operators offer mobile voice calls and access to mobile data at comparable rates. There is now little differentiation between mobile network service providers, and mobile network service providers have to seek other sources of sustainable competitive advantage. It is against this background that the purpose of this research is to measure South African mobile phone consumers' perceptions and expectations of the service provided by mobile network service providers.

A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science Computer Science in the School of Computer Science. Faculty of Science November 21, 2016.
There is stiff competition for customers and market share in the South African telecommunications industry amongst the four predominant mobile service providers, namely Vodacom, MTN, Cell C and Telkom Mobile. The First National Bank (FNB) through one of its entities, FNB Connect, has also joined this intensely competitive environment. These companies face a constant challenge of having to come up with new and innovative ways of attracting new customers and retaining their current ones. Cell C has embarked on a good strategy of claiming solid market share and growing itself against the competition by using the Private Label Promotions (PLP) group, a leading BEE Level 3 company that provides a variety of business solutions, to market GetMore, its value-added service package. A recommender system could be used to suggest and promote the items available in this package to existing and potential clients (users). There are different approaches to recommendation, the most widely used ones being the collaborative and content-based recommendation. The collaborative filtering approach uses the ratings of other users to recommend the items the current (active) user might like. In the content-based approach, items are recommended in terms of their content similarity to items a user has previously liked, or elements that have matched a user’s attributes (features). Hybrid recommendation approaches are used To eliminate the drawbacks individually associated with the CF and CBF approaches and to leverage their advantages. One of the aims of this research was to design and implement a prototype hybrid recommender system that would be used to recommend Cell C’s GetMore package to current and potential subscribers. The system was to implement matrix factorisation (collaborative) and cosine similarity (content-based) techniques. Several experiments were conducted to evaluate its performance and quality. The metrics used included Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) and Area Under the ROC Curve (AUC). We expected the proposed hybrid recommender system would leverage the advantages provided by its different components and demonstrate its effectiveness in providing Cell C’s customers with accurate and meaningful recommendations of its GetMore package services. Keywords: Content-based Recommendation, Collaborative Recommendation, Hybrid Recommendation, Cosine Similarity, Matrix Factorisation, Association Rule Mining, J48 Classifier, Decision Table, Naive Bayes, Simple K-means, Expectation Maximization, Farthest First, Predictive Apriori
LG2017

Submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Technology: Business Administration, Durban University of Technology, Durban, South Africa, 2017.
The term “wireless network” pertains to a very comprehensive field and at different points in history, meant different things. For example, in 1901 it would have meant Marconi’s first transatlantic communication and later, to the walkie-talkie in the Second World War. Since the late 1940’s, large companies and emergency services have used wide area private networks which could also be catergorised as wireless networks. However, public consciousness of wireless networks only arose in the 1980’s through the commercial distribution of cellular mobile radio. The telecommunications industry is experiencing a phenomenal revolution in which; the driving factors are innovative technologies, deregulation and globalization. Innovative technologies introduce dynamic changes in the way that telecommunication business is conducted. Deregulation is the liberalization of telecommunications which significantly increases the telecommunications market, while also allowing for strong competition amongst mobile service providers. Globalisation is the breakdown of legacy barriers which forces monopolistic service providers to compete in the international arena. With service delivery being identified as one of the key components for a successful telecommunications service provider, along with the Quality of Service of their network, both components are evaluated to determine how efficient the organisation is within the mobile telecommunications industry. Telecommunications service delivery is a way of ensuring the Quality of Service delivered for outsourced and retained services. The responsibilities of the mobile operator include monitoring, analyzing and reporting on service delivery performance in order, to ensure that customer satisfaction is met or even exceeded by the mobile operator. The South African mobile telecommunication industry is experiencing phenomenal growth, just like the rest of the world. Over the last two decades, the South African mobile telecommunications industry has experienced dramatic changes. Fixed line service providers have expanded into the mobile arena. Mobile operators are trying to form mergers and purchase fixed line companies. This study investigates the challenges faced by a mobile service provider in meeting internal customer needs. The Quality of Service (QoS) of the mobile network was evaluated and the various elements which contribute to challenges experienced by the service provider were identified. A mixed methods data collection method was employed for this study. To obtain the qualitative data, semi-structured interviews were conducted with management staff. Quantitative data was obtained through the use of questionnaires and an existing discourse analysis was conducted to identify characteristics on existing reports which were generated from within the organisation, for data collection. The results showed that the mobile operators had to be innovative and competitive simultaneously. Mobile operators face various challenges. The increased level of competition amongst service providers ensured improved QoS and service delivery to consumers. The mobile operator’s network foot print has to increase to provide its own network availability to clients. In order to avoid or reduce network sharing or roaming of network services as this comprises the client network coverage on the network. The mobile service provider should actively analyse network traffic to avoid potential disruptions and, to ensure that customers have a seamless connection. This study concludes that the changing environment of communications forces organizations to consistently re-evaluate their strategies and necessary re-align their strategies to the business needs of the organisation. The initial planning entails making technology choices to meet the overall business goals. However, technology is changing at an exponential rapid rate; therefore the organization should reach the completion of the product life cycle to ensure that this product is still required in the market. The main finding of this study reinforced the contention that planning is the most critical part of mobile network strategy. The organisation’s strategy may change to accommodate environmental changes. However, these changes should not affect the life cycle of the blueprint design.
M

This study is focused on the cellular communication needs and wants of undergraduate university and technikon students. The study derived its information from a survey of 224 students who, via a questionnaire, were able to detail their present and future cellular communication needs. Among other findings, the results of this survey, revealed the following: • The undergraduate university and technikon student market is not homogenous • Ninety-three percent of university and technikon students in the sample had access to a cellular telephone • Short Message Services (SMSs) and "Please Call Me" services were frequently favoured and used • The market segment is highly brand conscious, preferring specific branded cellular telephones • Despite having a limited access to disposable income (most of which is provided by their parents), respondents spent between R75 and R1 000 per month on their cellular needs.

A research report submitted to the Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management, University of the Witwatersrand, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Management specialising in Entrepreneurship and New Venture Creation. Wits Business School, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (March 2017)
Innovation is one of the core and key characteristics of entrepreneurship, which stimulates operational and financial success of a firm. Innovation is ambidextrous in nature, characterised by exploration and exploitation. This report is concerned with exploitative innovation, which is characterised by new; products, services, and processes. This Research Report investigates how human capital investments (years of schooling and years of work experience of telecoms firms’ senior managers and executives) relate to innovation performance. This paper uses the human capital theory and the resource base theory to understand the perceived impact of human capital investments on performance and also its perceived moderation effect on the nexus between innovation and performance. Research findings from 81 senior management and executives of four major telecoms firms in South Africa indicate that innovation has a perceived direct impact on the perceived success of the firm. However, a counterintuitive relationship of human capital investments with performance is observed. Furthermore, human capital investments have a counterintuitive moderating effect on the nexus between innovation and performance. Therefore, this research report discusses human capital variable configurations that are more likely to have a perceived impact on a telecoms firm performance, and human capital variable configuration that are likely to have a moderating effect on the nexus between innovation and performance.
MT2017

M. Tech. Business Administration
The objective of this study was to identify factors that are responsible for employee absenteeism in Vodacom SA, which is the largest mobile cell phone company in South Africa. In the literature, it has been extensively reported that absenteeism is a major cause of loss of income and revenues among mobile cell phone operators in South Africa. The purpose of this study was to identify the root causes of absenteeism in the cellular phone industry in South Africa. Data was collected from a random sample of 120 employees of Vodacom SA working in Midrand.