Mobile Telephone Industry Research Articles

Technology analysis and competitive strategy: the case of mobile telephones

This paper examines the validity of the strategic implications draun from the typology of generic strategies presented by Michael Porter. It is argued that the existence of technologies which simultaneously drive cost and performance make it possible to combine cost leadership and difflerentiation strategies, and yet be extremely competitive. The mobile telephone industry provides us with an illustrative empirical example. In this case, rather than a ‘stuck in the middle’ strategy, we found a ‘luck in the middle’ strategy.

Market failure in ‘open’ telecommunications networks: Defining the new ‘natural monopoly’

This paper is a response to ‘Public policy for a multiproduct firm: tearing down the “Berlin Wall” in telecommunications’, by Edward C. Beauvais and Virginia K. Sheffield of GTE. 1 It refutes these authors' portrayal of the demise of the telecommunications monopoly by exploring the formation of market power in highly interconnected, high-capacity telecommunications networks, and in so doing it identifies the limitations of effective competition in nominally ‘open’ network environments. The paper will argue that efforts to prescribe ‘unnatural’ industry structures are doomed to failure, and that ‘natural’, often highly concentrated markets will evolve in network-based industries despite efforts to legislate balkanization. Examples are drawn from the cellular mobile telephone industry, the airline industry, and the interexchange (long-distance) telephone common carrier markets. Drawing on this experience, the paper will demonstrate that current regulatory reform initiatives of the dominant local telephone monopolies that are either predicated upon or portrayed as leading to the development of effective competition at the local exchange constitute little more than a ‘regulatory gaming’ strategy that is more likely to impede the development of competition than affirmatively to promote it.