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WAP: Where Are (the) Phones?

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Voice&Data Bureau
New Update

The
rhetoric about WAP has finall given way to the reality as
mobile network operators have realized that there is little
money to be made or competitive advantage to be gained from
WAP today. Everyone (and we mean everyone) is doing it, but
very few are doing it with any impact or innovation
(everyone is doing the same tired services we have seen
before and all through Internet portals).

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Somehow WAP, a mere
protocol, a means to an end, got elevated into an end in
itself. Many IT companies, financial analysts, advertising
agencies and Web design agencies were sucked into the whole
full mobile Internet access myth. The lessons from WAP do
not bode well for the mobile data revolution that we all
anticipate. Lots of people have been misled and lots of
claims have been exaggerated but no real damage has been
done. We will get to the mobile Internet but need to be
honest in making people clear of the current limitations of
mobile devices.

The mobile
communications industry itself should have known better, but
then, data is a new thing and everyone was looking for a way
to make it successful to get circuit-switched data traffic
up and make information services a success finally. Some
pundits are joking that the WAP should rather be renamed
"Where Are (the) Phones" Network operators and
retailers are finding it hard to get large volumes of
working WAP phones.

Unfortunately, mention
of customers has been neglected in the whole WAP story–the
phones, tariffs, service configuration and provisioning,
service access and all other elements of the value chain
have been disregarded. For example:

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  • It
    is difficult to configure WAP phones for new WAP
    services, with 20 or so different parameters needed to
    be entered to gain access to a WAP service. Only the
    Nokia 7110 can be programmed over the air to take the
    burden of such service configuration away from the user.
    This raises the issue of the operator providing adequate
    support to their WAP service subscribers. Many operators
    are working with phone manufacturers to receive their
    WAP phones with their WAP gateway settings
    pre-programmed.

  • WAP
    is a protocol that runs on top of an underlying bearer.
    None of the existing GSM bearers for WAP–Short Message
    Service (SMS), Unstructured Supplementary Services Data
    (USSD) and Circuit Switched Data (CSD) are optimized for
    WAP. The forthcoming General Packet Radio Service (GPRS),
    with its immediacy and packet transport and new
    tariffing models, is a more ideal bearer. The TDMA
    standards body designed a new bearer called GUTS,
    especially for use with WAP services.

  • WAP
    services are expected to be expensive to use since the
    tendency is to be online for a long CSD call since
    features such as interactivity and selection of more
    information are used by the end -user. It takes several
    short messages to send one piece of information through
    WAP. Without specific tariff initiatives, there are
    likely to be some "bill-shocked" and surprised
    WAP users when they see their mobile phone bill for the
    first time after starting to use WAP, even if their user
    experience was good.

  • The
    WAP standard has just become more complete, with key
    elements such as push (proactive sending of information
    to mobile devices) and wireless telephony (updating
    address reports and the like) now being addressed by the
    recently released WAP 1.2 specifications. However, most
    of the current products are based on the old WAP 1.1
    specifications. These products have to now incorporate
    them. Implementation of it is at least a few months
    away. Meanwhile, proprietary push protocols from the
    likes of Phone.com could complicate implementation of
    push.

  • There
    are many WAP gateway vendors out there competing against
    each other with largely the same standardized product.
    This has led to consolidation such as Phone.com
    acquiring APiON, Onebox.com, and Paragon Software. With
    other biggies like IBM, Microsoft, Sun, HP, and Cisco
    eyeing the WAP solutions market, further M&As could
    likely be the order of the day.

  • Other
    protocols such as SIM Application Toolkit and Mobile
    Station Application Execution Environment (MExE) are
    respectively already widely supported or designed to
    supercede WAP. It will be interesting to see how all
    these protocols handle convergence with W3C’s new open
    Internet standard, XML.

It might have been
better to wait until WAP 1.2 and GPRS are implemented before
launching WAP services commercially. Plans for updating the
WAP 1.1 phones that are now being sold, to WAP 1.2 are
unclear. Have these issues even been considered? We think we
know why customers have been ignored by the WAP Forum having
attended the proceedings at the WAP Forum’s meeting in
London in the summer of 1999. The WAP Forum is divided into
"Experts" Groups who sit around and discuss arcane
technical details in mind numbing detail. You might think
that the Marketing Experts Group would be interested in
customers and keeping the proceedings customer centric but
no, it turns out that all they are interested in is how many
press articles have been written about WAP. We did not hear
the word "customer" once during the proceedings.

We certainly think
that WAP will be important to enable the smooth transition
from one bearer to another such as the migration of existing
applications to GPRS. We are certainly at crossroads in
mobile communications as we move from voice to non-voice
centric services. We have a lot to learn from WAP and other
services. Within 18 months, all new mobile phones will
support WAP, but how many subscribers will there be?

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Simon
Buckingham,

founder and CEO, Mobile Lifestreams.

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