The Wireless Application Protocol had the biggest coming-out party of its 20-month life span during Telecom ’99 in Geneva, with more than 100 carriers, vendors and content providers displaying WAP and WAP-related products, warts and all.
While WAP’s momentum has grown all year, many consider Telecom ’99 the beginning of a shift from the development stage to the deployment stage.
“It wasn’t just one company. More than 100 were showing WAP or WAP-related products and that’s what created the buzz,” said Greg Williams, chairman of the WAP Forum and vice president of wireless networks at SBC Communications Inc. “I think if we could have had more WAP handsets to put in people’s hands, it could have been more. The one complaint I heard is that it’s too hard to get devices.”
So far, only European consumers have been able to benefit from WAP service. As U.S. carriers take possession of WAP handsets, though, they expect to begin introducing their own services, probably sometime next year.
With Global System for Mobile communications regulated as Europe’s transmission standard, European carriers were able to develop more sophisticated networks faster than their U.S. counterparts, who have to contend with fragmented airlink standards.
But with data traffic on wireline networks already overtaking voice traffic, the convergence of the Internet with wireless networks is expected to be the basis for competition in the coming millennium.
Central to WAP’s success is that it represents the path leading carriers to this new competitive space, providing carriers and vendors worldwide with an acceptable standard to transmit and receive Internet content on wireless devices.
Applications interest
To best gauge the growing interest in the standard, one can look to the building interest in the developer community-those creating the applications that will propel the use of WAP-enabled phones and networks.
Zsigo Wireless Data Consultants Inc.-a Michigan-based firm that conducts training programs and products on WAP and other wireless data technology for developers-recently introduced its first WAP training CD and plans to introduce a WAP certification test soon.
Konstantin Zsigo, the company’s president, said interest in WAP training has skyrocketed among developers.
“We’re sending CDs all around the world,” he said. “If people want training, that’s an indicator … Developers are not too speculative. They go either where they’re told or where the money is.”
Zsigo made available non-technical training programs more than a year ago for HDML, a WAP precursor, followed by technical HDML six months later. Both received a rather cool response. In the month-and-a-half since its WAP training CD came out, it has outsold the HDML versions by a ratio of 2-to-1.
“People are getting real confident (WAP) is going to happen and getting interested,” Zsigo said. “It’s not an option any more.”
Interoperability problems
But that’s not to say carriers and vendors can just sit back and wait for the applications to roll in. In their haste to get WAP phones and network servers into the marketplace, vendors have introduced WAP products that are not fully compatible with WAP products from other companies, a problem not unnoticed at the Geneva show.
Although the WAP Forum has set compatibility standards, not all have been met. The standard is solid, analysts say. The weak link is how vendors implement it.
Hamad Rashid, director of software engineering at Zsigo, said a WAP-enabled phone made by Nokia Corp., for instance, has some difficulty interacting with an UP.Link WAP server made by Phone.com Inc.
“There certainly are some issues,” he said. “I think what happened here is that products were rushed to market. We’ll see improvement in the next couple of months.” He expects WAP products from competing companies to achieve 95-percent interoperability soon.
However there is another level to the interoperability issue-that of applications. Ideally, an application developer should be able to write one WAP application that can be implemented on all WAP servers, regardless of manufacturer. But that is not always the case.
“We know the goal is for full interoperability and device independence, but we don’t think that’s going to happen in the short term at all,” Zsigo said.
Already, some developers are writing WAP applications specific to a certain phone or carrier, which become garbled or totally inaccessible to others.
“If they make it to a specific handset, it might be something not universal to all,” said the WAP Forum’s Williams. “That’s where I think the problem could occur.”
Additionally, some carriers are offering customized WAP training specific to their network. At Wireless I.T. next week, Nextel Communications Inc. is expected to announce a specialized WAP training program in conjunction with Zsigo, the first of many such expected training offers.
“You’re going to see a lot of offshoots there,” Zsigo said. “People are looking for differentiation. Nextel is gambling that WAP on their network is better than WAP on others.”
Carriers are trying to differentiate themselves not just with end users, but to developers as well. They want the best WAP applications on their network as a means of attracting customers to it.
Williams said the WAP Forum is considering a proposal to create a style guide for developers at the next board meeting, and currently has an interoperability group that tests devices against various services and content. He said the forum hopes to eventually implement a WAP branding program to ensure any product or service stamped with the WAP logo will be completely interoperable with any other.
Looking to maintain the momentum it has achieved so far, Williams said the WAP Forum plans to continue developing WAP and release upgrades to version 1.1 that include support for multimedia and streaming video services.
“WAP 1.1 was a standard that the industry-carriers and vendors together-felt was a commercially viable standard, one that they could use to provide the kind of services they wanted to deploy,” Williams said. “I’d say WAP 1.1 is a solid standard, but it will continue to evolve, as does any other standard … There’s a balance we must have between creating a standard everybody has, but not in such a way that won’t allow new ideas, one in which content is easily usable, but not restricted so that it can’t evolve.”
As such, the WAP Forum has tied WAP’s continued momentum to the evolution of the Internet-specifically, eXtensible Markup Language.
“We’re spending a lot of time seeing that WAP is a part of the whole Internet evolution,” Williams said. “We are working with any Internet group such as with the (World Wide Web Consortium) and linking to industry associations and standards organizations like (the European Telecommunications Standards Institute) … evolving WAP so it becomes a part of XML as it moves forward, allowing us to evolve WAP along with the Internet.”
