Sample Research Proposal on The UK Telecommunicaitons Industry:

INTRODUCTION                 The UK telecommunications industry is one of the leading in Europe, because its liberal telecoms regime and access to leading-edge technology has attracted the majority of telecommunications operators, service providers and manufacturers over the years (Department of Trade and Industry UK, 2006). At a glance, the UK telecommunications industry since its establishment in 1969 provides £29.9 billion overall revenue and an employment of about 104,700 employees (SPSS Inc., 2000). Specifically, the turnover of its market in year 1999/2000 was £31.5 billion. In 2004, the UK market for telecommunications is estimated to have increased by more than 28% in nominal terms to a value of £31.3 billion (Invest NI's Business Information & Euro Info Centre, 2005). It can be considered that the industry is going strong as more than two thirds of all people in the UK own a mobile telephone. Also, the four UK networks have 34 million customers (Foreign and Commonwealth Office, 2001). UK is fortunate to have a strong telecommunications industry because it is considered as the backbone of business activity, productivity, and trade (Bauer, Mody and Straubhaar, 1995).             Traditionally, telephony in UK has been only limited with traditional telephones and mobile phones. But currently, the rapid growth of Internet-based services has introduced a new telecommunication sector to the industry – the Internet Protocol Telephony sector.  Today, a rapidly expanding IP telephony industry already offers consumers and businesses the ability to make calls over the internet (OUT-LAW News, 2004). Last 2004, this sector has already set up its own trade association to promote and represent the needs of the sector (Richardson, 2004). This sector, known as the Internet Telephony Service Providers Association (ITSPA), was set up to act as the representative voice of the industry to UK Government bodies such as the DTI, The Home Office and Ofcom, as well as to the European Commission and other regulators (ITSPA, 2004). Another task of this body is to encourage the innovation and development of the Internet Telephony industry through the promotion of self-regulation and competition (ITSPA, 2004).               According to ITSPA (2005), Voice-over Internet Protocol is a "dynamic industry, with services still in the early phases of mass rollout". One of the concerns mentioned about the internet protocol telephony in the UK is that it is still unexposed. Currently, there is a lack of specific consideration of the growing UK VoIP market. Furthermore, there is also a lack of specific reference on the Undertakings themselves, or specific new obligations to support the VoIP market (ITSPA, 2005). This shows that VoIP in the UK is still weak, which means they cannot yet compete toe-to-toe with telecom giants in the mobile and traditional telephony sector.               Because of the current status of the young VoIP industry in the UK, there is a great need to assess current productivity of companies that belong in the sector. Although the industry somehow enjoys a fair demand rate from companies, the fact that the ITSPA is still new and there are only few companies cannot be undermined. Furthermore, there is also an evident lack of regulations as ITSPA are still in the process of proposing regulations for the industry and reviewing those that the telecommunications industry, in general, proposes.               This study will be explored descriptively. It will investigate two VoIP companies in the UK and determine the types of management they apply and the current regulations that they follow.   Two known VoIP companies in UK today include Idesk and Imass Telecom. These companies offer VoIP services all over UK. Furthermore, they preach the promise of VoIP that it can cut down the cost of telephone bills to 50%. They also preach other advantages of VoIP and are confident with their services. However, as observed in their websites, these companies are still new and are still struggling to compete with traditional telephony and mobile telephony. Thus, investigating their management approach and incorporating regulations can be a step ahead in the growing VoIP sector. Through this, new knowledge may be discovered about the industry and about how it operates. This study may also learn the different regulations that companies within the industry comply into, and be able to assess their strengths and weaknesses, and what are still needed to be done. LITERATURE REVIEW               Internet Protocol Telephony (IPT) is the transport of telephone calls over the Internet (Iptel.org, 2004). Also known as the "Voice-over IP", it transmits voice and fax over data networks using Internet Protocol. Originated from early Internet phones, the IPT has gone into the mainstream status and has been made available to different sectors (Samahon, 1999).  Its difference from the early Internet phone client software is that it eliminates the need to dial from a computer. Instead, a caller dials a "gateway" or computer hardware that connects a speaker's phone-initiated call to an IP network; the caller then dials the desired phone number and the gateway completes the call to a standard phone handset (Court, 1999). Aside from its speed and easiness of use as compared to early internet phones and telecommunications, it also provides lower cost per day and lower infrastructure cost (Anonymous, 2004). Today, IPT or VoIP is widely deployed by carriers, especially for international telephone calls (Anonymous, 2004). Furthermore, VoIP is also used by large companies to eliminate call charges between their offices, by using their data network to carry inter-office calls and reduce the costs of calls outside the company, by carrying them to the nearest point on their network before handing them off to the PSTN (Anonymous, 2004).   The new telephony technology in the presence of IPT has evidently taken advantage of the internet. The same logic can be applied to managers who have adopted IPT. Otto et al (2002) stated that the success of new technologies in the market depends, in part, upon consumers finding the technology offerings relevant to their needs. In new technology markets with underdeveloped preference structures, technology managers and developers must match the capabilities of the new technology to the needs of the target consumers (Roberts, 2000). Most managers saw the potential of IPT in lowering cost (Otto et al, 2002). With the IPT or VoIP, consumers can communicate telephone-to-telephone, computer-to-telephone, or computer-to-computer with the Internet carrying the voice traffic with less cost as compared to the traditional analog telephony. The Internet telephone providers' strategy for gaining consumer market share has been to attack the price sensitive long distance market by offering rates anywhere from free (with banner advertisements) to 4 cents per minute for calls within the USA (Net2Phone Corporation, 2001).   Telindus and Cisco, two leading IPT providers, have listed nine benefits that can be acquired from the implementation of IPT (Anonymous, 2003). The benefits are: the ease with which communications applications are employed and created; the stress-free increase in personal and group productivity; the ability to conference on demand; the intrinsic flexibility of IP networks; the unification of communications and information at the application level; the ability to deliver superior services via IP-enhanced call centers; the ability to interface real-time communications with business processes; lower communications and network management costs; and the overall impact on the bottom line (Anonymous, 2003). Almost similar above, Iptel.org (2004), an SIP solution provider, enumerated and explained the reasons why IPT is better than PSTN. Basically, in IPT, only data-oriented switches could be deployed for switching data as well as packetized voice. Moreover, multiplexing data and voice could also result in better bandwidth utilization than in today's over-engineered voice-or-nothing links. With this, not only the providers will profit of lower costs, but also their clients. Another benefit that can be acquired from IPT is that customers may take advantage of flat Internet rating versus hierarchical PSTN rating and save money while letting their long-distance calls be routed over Internet. Finally, deployment of new IP telephony services requires significantly lower investment in terms of time and money than in the traditional PSTN environment, thus saving costs for the company.   On the contrary, despite several claims of its advantages, there are also critics of IPT that emphasize its disadvantages. For instance, according to Hicks (2004), "applications such as Voice over IP telephony and videoconferencing could be vulnerable to security breaches because of flaws in the way a major telephony standard is being used." He explained that some vendors' implementations of the H.323 protocol, an International Telecommunications Union standard for communication among telephony and multimedia devices, are vulnerable to denial-of- service attacks and, to a lesser extent, the execution of code and system takeovers through buffer overflows (Hicks, 2004). This is according to an advisory issued last January by the U.K. group National Infrastructure Security Co-Ordination Centre (NISCC).             Another issue that should be considered a disadvantage in IP Telephony is that it is still technologically inhibited. Technology inhibitors that exist are: quality of service; scalability; and lack of converged management system (Captaris, 2003). IPT falls short in the quality of service as compared to the traditional analog telephony in a sense that it still lacks the ability to route the content packets in a timely manner, both within the enterprise as well as on the public network (Captaris, 2003). This is supported by Nigam (2002) when he stated that "presently, quality, convenience and reliability of IP telephony are inferior to PSTN." Being a subject to availability of the service, residential users could be among the largest users of the service and might be indifferent to the quality issues if they are compensated from the huge price difference on long distance international calls (Nigam, 2002). This can create problems to the company because once customers experience dissatisfaction; they might just go on looking for other companies that offer better service.   RESEARCH DESIGN AND PHILOSOPHY The study will apply the interpretevism research philosophy as it will explore the strengths and weaknesses of IP telephony in the United Kingdom. Interpretivism is the necessary research philosophy for this study because it allows the search the 'details of the situation to understand the reality or perhaps a reality working behind them' (Remenyi et al, 1998). The research strategy to be used is exploratory research as the study will involve literature review, interview of experts in the field, and survey of respondents.               Two IP Telephony UK-based companies, specifically Imass Telecom and Idesk, will be explored in the study. Managers and employees will be interviewed. Furthermore, representatives of ITSPA will also be interviewed to determine their current plans and to assess the means of how they address regulations in the industry   FINDINGS The findings of the study will be acquired through qualitative research. The research strategy that will be used is the case study approach. A case study is defined as a strategy for doing research that involves an empirical investigation of a particular contemporary phenomenon within its real life context with the utilisation of various sources of evidence, and in this strategy, one has the considerable ability to generate answers for the questions "why?", "what?" and "how?", where data collection methods applicable with such approach include questionnaires, interviews, observation, and documentary analysis (Robson, 2002; Morris & Wood, 1991; Saunders et al, 2003).