How do the interest of carriers differ from the interests of websites? What are the implications for websites from a value chain perspective?

The interest of the carriers focuses on how to get money from both the end user (the customer) and the companies/individuals running the websites (i.e. Netflix, Amazon, etc.); whereas websites’ mainly focus on getting money from the end user, be it from subscriptions or money back in advertisement payments. Carriers are subjected to the power of the buyers and therefore have to be aware that the buyers can possibly change carriers if they restrict their services too much (Kroenke and Wallace, 36). However, websites are constantly under threat from substitutes and therefore have to keep providing their particular service or create new services to keep their website in the forefront of consumer’s minds (Kroenke and Wallace, 37). Websites also are constantly under threat from new entrants as creating a website and offering services, while it can be costly, it does not have to be – unlike with cell phone carriers where the cost of entry into the business was considerably higher (Kroenke and Wallace, 35).

Cell phone carriers have their own rivalries to contend with among their existing competitors – Verizon vs. AT&T vs. Virgin vs. T-Mobile (Kroenke and Wallace, 38). From a value chain perspective, this puts the websites under more strain to keep new and exciting features or services whereas carriers just have to compete with what their existing competition is providing in order to stay on top. Unfortunately with both websites and carriers there aren’t hard-set benchmarks of service to hold each other accountable for some minimal standard and therefore the proverbial bar is never quite set in stone and can always change. At least with carriers there’s a bit of an unofficial benchmark to at least provide what the competition is providing in order to maintain the status quo. With websites there isn’t anything that sets one website over another. Take for example Netflix vs. Amazon. The way these two service websites provide content to their customers is via contracts with movie license holders in order to have rights to showcase the respective movies (Stenovec). These contracts have variable lengths and therefore can be renegotiated and one of the two companies can get rights to movies they previously did not have rights to. This is not the same with mobile carrier services – AT&T isn’t going to lose rights to 3gbs of data for their clients.

Overall the websites face stronger and ever changing competition from new sites that have low to no cost of entry. Carrier competition have a much higher cost of entry and therefore face less competition, though the carrier competition has higher stakes from a monetary point of view. Websites must constantly be changing to maintain their edge in the ever changing e-world of the internet and keep their offerings new and ever-improving in order to maintain their consumer base.


Kroenke, David M. and Wallace, Patricia. Introduction to Managing Information Technology. Boston: Pearson Learning Solutions, 2015. Print.

Stenovec, Timothy. This is Why You Won’t See Oscar Blockbusters Streaming On Netflix. HuffingtonPost.com 4 March 2014. Retrieved 8 Feb. 2015. .