The Public WLAN Market And Its Business Models - An Empirical Study

Wireless local area network (WLAN) is a radical technology, enabling new ways to provide mobile access. A number of established and new companies have entered the mobile market with new business models. Yet, it is not clear how these new business models affect the mobile industry and which of them will really succeed. We introduced the IDEA framework to guide the design and evaluation systems of new business models driven by new and radical technologies and applied it to the WLAN technology and business models that it enables (Shubar and Lechner 2003). This article focuses on the empiric validation of our hypotheses regarding the public WLAN (PWLAN) industry. We develop the hypotheses according to the IDEA framework for business model design and evaluation. In the empirical study we analyze business models of 118 PWLAN companies and compare them with the business model types, which we have identified according to the IDEA framework. The second subject of our empirical research are recent alliances and cooperations in the PWLAN industry. We analyse 78 alliances and co-operations. This article targets academics, who are interested in business model innovation, as well business people, who are interested in the recent development of the PWLAN industry.