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Industry Mapping

Introduction

What is the telecoms industry? How does it relate to other activities in areas such as computing, software, semiconductors, the internet and electronic commerce, and the media? Where are its boundaries? What products and services should be included within it? What are its major markets? Which companies should be included in the industry?

In TelecomVisions we tackle these important questions by developing a layer model in order to map the industry. What is the rationale underlying our model?

In explaining this rationale it is worth beginning by noting that layer models generally have a long and distinguished history in the telecommunications and computing fields. In the area of engineering and software design, layer models play a particularly important role. More specifically, they allow engineers to reduce and render tractable the awesome complexity of complex systems. They help to achieve this purpose essentially by decomposing the system into relatively autonomous subsystems that interact with each other through an interface that is often standardised in order to facilitate co-ordination. The advantage of this is that those working on a particular subsystem need have little or no knowledge of what is happening in the other subsystems, as long as they know how to produce the interface that connects their subsystem to the others. In this way the process of division of labour and specialisation is advanced.

The Nobel Prizewinning economist, Herbert Simon, who has also made significant contributions in the field of artificial intelligence, has noted how the process of decomposition of complex systems helps to economise on the scarcity of human attention. Janet Abbate has analysed in detail the evolution of layer thinking in the development of the ARPANET, Internet and World Wide Web. See references in Site Bibliography.

But the layer model does more than merely decompose a complex system into component subsystems. While each layer may be thought of as a subsystem (usually further subdivided into sub-sub-systems, and even further subdivided), the layer model also, by its nature, draws attention to the interdependence of each layer on the layers below and above it. From a technical and overall system performance point of view the task is to ensure that the interdependence between the layers is realised in an effective way.