Determinants of Adopting Intelligent Broadband Services in Residential Community

Introduction

Since broadband internet services gradually become a basic facility, in order to capture the differentiation trend for their residential community packages, property developers are now seeking innovative application services to leverage their broadband network infrastructure. Comparing with the single broadband connection services provided in traditional residential communities, new residential communities tend to compass more intelligent broadband services. Therefore, residents living in a new residential community can embrace a variety of lifestyles and convey high satisfaction due to the increased efficiency, security, comfort and convenience in their daily life and work. In this study, “intelligent broadband services provided in residential community” is defined as diverse services other than high-speed internet service over broadband network. Intelligent broadband services include, but are not limited to, residential video surveillance, video conference, Telehealth services, t-commerce, VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol), e-learning, home entertainment, IPTV (Internet Protocol Television) and VoD (Video on Demand).

Previous literature showed that the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) (Davis, 1989) had been widely utilized in empirical studies to predict and explain user behavior on innovative products and services (Davis, 1989; Davis, Bagozzi, & Warshaw, 1989). In addition, Rogers (1995) classified adopters of innovation into five groups, namely innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. This implies that the behaviors of different user groups on adopting innovative products and services vary.

No previous study has attempted to examine user behavior on the adoption of intelligent broadband services in residential community. In this study, based on perceived usefulness (PU) and perceived ease of use (PEOU) of the services, TAM was used to predict the behavior on user adoption of intelligent broadband services.

In addition, personal innovativeness (Kuo & Yen, 2009; López-Nicolás, Molina-Castillo, & Bouwmanb, 2008; Lu, Yao, & Yu, 2005), perceived benefits (Hsu & Lin, 2008; López-Nicolás, Molina-Castillo, & Bouwmanb, 2008), media advertisements (Rogers, 1995), policy measures and government endorsements all have various degrees of influence on the adoption of intelligent broadband services. However, few studies examined these topics in the field of telecommunication services before. Therefore, this study also identified four additional factors that influence on the behavioral intention (BI) to adopt intelligent broadband services, namely media influence, government influence, perceived benefits and personal innovativeness.

Factors mentioned above were combined to establish the theoretical framework of this study, and to construct the hypothesized model. An empirical study was then conducted by utilizing the model to examine the determinants of behavioral intention to adopt intelligent broadband services through the perspectives of three different user groups including innovators/early adopters, early majority and late majority/laggards (Rogers, 1995).

The purpose of this study was to provide theoretical and empirical analyses on the influential factors associating with potential users’ adoption behaviors of intelligent broadband services in residential communities. To sum up, the study has following objectives:

• (1)

  Identify the factors that determine users’ adoption of intelligent broadband services in residential community.

• (2)

  Propose a hypothesized model based on TAM that is tailored towards intelligent broadband services in residential community.

• (3)

  Compare the differences of determinants influencing adoption of the intelligent broadband services among three different user groups.