چكيده به لاتين
Slow rate of adoption and diffusion of 4G technology has had a number of unsuitable outcomes for Iranian telecoms operators. These outcomes entail 1) operators’ inability in providing high-quality services, 2) inability in competing with OTT technologies, 3) loss of several revenue opportunities, 4) prolongation of return of investment and 5) non-integrability with 5G networks and loss of IoT opportunities. Therefore, this dissertation has been conducted with the purpose of modeling the adoption and diffusion of mobile telecoms technologies (MTTs) focusing on 4G. However, due to the fact that MTTs can have interplay, this study has not been confined to 4G and other MTTs (2G, 3G and 5G) have also been taken into consideration. The proposed model is based on agent-based modeling (ABM) and social network theory (SNT) through which limitations of prior studies such as 1) unbounded rationality and perfect information of technology adopters, 2) non-attention to network effects, individual agents’ interaction, and emergent phenomena have been overcome. This model is composed of 20 properties, 15 input parameters and a 7-level behavioral pattern which is all written in Netlogo 6.0.1 and its results are analyzed by R 3.5.3.
The results of this model can help mobile telecoms planners understand the mechanism underlying the adoption and diffusions of MTTs in Iran and take smart actions to manage them. These results can be summed up as following
- The social network of Iranian society is to a large extent a small world network where 1) degree distribution is similar to passion distribution with a Lambda ranging from 4 to 6. This means that Iranian people interact with each other via such a probability function, 2) clustering coefficient (CC) is high (0.34 for the sampled agents and 0.75 for entire society) the highness of CC implies that in social network of Iran, each person likes his or her friends to know each other, 3) average path length (L) is short (3 for sampled agents and 8 for entire society). Shortness of L implies that in Iran, people can reach each other through a small number of steps.
-Device compatibility with 4G network (4GCom) is necessary for adoption and diffusion of this technology in society while TV advertisement is not necessary
-4GCom is more influential in diffusion of 4G than Ad and this is basically because of 1) technology push nature of MTTs and 2) high power of word-of-mouth in small-world networks.
-The most appropriate scenarios in diffusion of 4G are those scenarios that 1) their diffusion score is among the highest ones and 2) have the minimum number of steps. The major outcomes of such scenarios are 1) acceleration of diffusion in a short time which mainly increases the number of subscribers in a short period of time and subsequently average revenue per user (ARPU (, 2) fewer times of support meaning that implementation of a step (S) needs a resource in each time that its allocation requires organizational resources, so the less time of support, the less resource needed for allocation.
-MTTs are in sequence and any delayed entry to one MTT (because of trends misunderstanding and mismanagement) will cause an anomaly in diffusion of the next one. This anomaly is the situation where a lower-generation MTT is used by people in spite of the availability of a higher-generation MTT. For example, in the first time period of Farvardin 1397 (March 2017) to the mid Bahman 1398 (February 2020), there are some emigrants from 2G to 3G in spite of the availability of 4G. The major reasons of this anomaly were incorrect timing for entry to 3G and monopolization which ultimately brought about unpreparedness of operators for emigration to 4G that this caused some people don’t make sense of the difference of 4G and 3G and even a number of users get dissuaded to switch to 4G. Because of chained and sequential nature of telecoms technologies, this anomaly has been observed for 5G over time.
