Abstract
Since the launch of public cellular mobile communication in late 1970s the mobile phone industry has shown radical changes and an increasing structural complexity creating new opportunities and new challenges both for infrastructure and service providers and for costumers. In the beginning the industry architecture consisted of three layers: the equipment, network and service layers. Telecommunications liberalization, the introduction of competition and the introduction of Internet technologies made this structure more complex and it is now possible to identify six layers: equipment and software, network, connectivity, navigation and middleware, applications including content and customers. As a result of this new phenomenon, researchers often refer to the mobile industry as the "datacom space" that consists of three elements: hardware, software and the services used to transport data and voice traffic over IP based networks. With the emergence of the datacom space the concept of value network has been introduced to describe the industry structure. The value network is composed of different actors drawn from a range of industry that collectively provide goods and services to the end users.
