Offering telecom service providers a survival strategy based on customer-centered marketing, this forward-looking resource helps strategic planners and managers assess their company's market potential and target desirable segments successfully.

The ultimate instructional guide to achieving success in the service sector Already responsible for employing the bulk of the U.S. workforce, service-providing industries continue to increase their economic dominance. Because of this fact, these companies are looking for talented new service systems engineers to take on strategic and operational challenges. This instructional guide supplies essential tools for career seekers in the service field, including techniques on how to apply scientific, engineering, and business management principles effectively to integrate technology into the workplace. This book provides: Broad-based concepts, skills, and capabilities in twelve categories, which form the "Three-Decker Leadership Architecture," including creative thinking and innovations in services, knowledge management, and globalization Materials supplemented and enhanced by a large number of case studies and examples Skills for successful service engineering and management to create strategic differentiation and operational excellence for service organizations Focused training on becoming a systems engineer, a critically needed position that, according to a 2009 Moneyline article on the best jobs in America, ranks at the top of the list Service Systems Management and Engineering is not only a valuable addition to a college classroom, but also an extremely handy reference for industry leaders looking to explore the possibilities presented by the expanding service economy, allowing them to better target strategies for greater achievement.

Engineering managers and professionals make a long and lasting impact in the industry by regularly developing technology-based projects, as related to new product development, new service innovation or efficiency-centered process improvement, or both—to create strategic differentiation and operational excellence for their employers. They need certain business fundamentals that enable them to make decisions, based on both technology and business perspectives, leading to new or improved product or service offerings, which are technically feasible, economically viable, marketplace acceptable, and customer enlightening. This book consists of three sets of business fundamentals. The chapter “Cost Accounting and Control” discusses service and product costing, activity-based costing to define overhead expenses, and risk analysis and cost estimation under uncertainty. The chapter “Financial Accounting and Analysis” delineates the key financial statements, financial analyses, balanced scorecard, ratio analysis, and capital asset valuation—including operations, opportunities, and acquisition and mergers. The chapter “Marketing Management” reviews marketing functions, marketing forecasting, marketing segmentation, customers, and other factors affecting marketing in making value-adding contributions. The new business vocabulary and useful analysis tools presented will enable engineering managers to become more effective when interacting with senior management, and to prepare themselves for assuming higher-level corporate responsibilities.

Here's everything you want to know about PLC technology, theory, applications, and installation organized for you in the first definitive English-language book on the subject. You get a solid theoretical grounding on this emerging alternative to Wi-Fi and Ethernet together with best-practice examples of PLC deployments and down-to-business procedures to install PLC in the home, design large-scale PLC networks for businesses and communities, and choose the right technology and equipment for any application. A state-of-the-art reference, how-to guide, and problem-solver wrapped up in one complete source, this benchmark work brings you quickly up to speed on PLC network architecture, functionalities, security issues, and applications. You get details on PLC modems, transformers, and other equipment along with PLC installation and configuration guidelines that cover everything from choosing the topology for a PLC network to configuring parameters under Windows or Linux/BSD. The book spells out steps to install PLC in homes followed by design and configuration procedures for PLC business networks that cover all issues involving network architecture, standard and equipment selection, security, and other essentials. The book also explores the development of community-wide PLC networks and the emergence of hybrid PLC-Ethernet-Wi-Fi applications. Supported by real-world examples and 280 illustrations, this hands-on resource takes you to the cutting edge of power line communications and helps you tap its rich potential moving forward.

Addressing the vulnerabilities in today's critical infrastructure to natural disasters and terrorism, this practical book describes what public safety and other officials need to do to protect should be doing to pipelines, power plants, telecommunications, and other essential services before the unthinkable happens. The book explains how to maintain command and control in any disaster, and how to predict the probability of those disasters. Written by two highly regarded experts in the field, this one-of-a-kind guidebook shows how to simplify risk assessments and emergency response procedures to disasters affecting our critical national and local infrastructure.

This practical resource provides a survey on the technologies, protocols, and architectures that are widely used in practice to implement networked multimedia services. The book presents the background and basic concepts behind multimedia networking, and provides a detailed analysis of how multimedia services work, reviewing the diverse network protocols that are of common use to implement them. To guide the explanation of concepts, the book focuses on a representative set of networked multimedia services with proven success and high penetration in the telecommunication market, namely Internet telephony, Video-on-Demand (VoD), and live IP television (IPTV). Contents are presented following a stepwise approach, describing each network protocol in the context of a networked multimedia service and making appropriate references to the protocol as needed in the description of other multimedia services. This book also contains questions and exercises to provide the reader with insight on the practical application of the explained concepts. Additionally, a laboratory practice is included, based on open-source tools and software, to analyze the operation of an Internet telephony service from a practical perspective, as well as to deploy some of its fundamental components.