Most conversations regarding the wireless Internet in the industry today revolve around Wireless Application Protocol technology, but several companies are bucking this trend-aiming to extend Internet content to wireless phones using alternative means to WAP.
Providing them the opportunity to do so is WAP itself. The technology’s evangelists have created enormous hype surrounding the opportunities of Internet content on wireless phones, but have yet to meet that hype with commercially available WAP products and services.
“WAP right now clearly is what has the buzz,” said Jack Armstrong, vice president of mobile data services at Spyglass Inc. “It brought together all the players needed in the value chain to a standard means of delivering applications. Until this point, none of that has happened before.”
But perhaps the primary complaint about WAP right now is its availability, or lack thereof. A running joke among industry players has the WAP acronym meaning “Where Are the Phones?” Even pre-WAP phones based on Phone.com Inc.’s HDML browser-server solution are sometimes difficult to get, such as the NeoPoint 1000. Demand, to an extent, exceeds supply.
So while carriers evaluate WAP servers and conduct interoperability tests with WAP handsets from different vendors, non-WAP wireless Internet providers are making their play-taking advantage of the buzz around the space WAP has created, as well as the lag time in its promise, to enter the marketplace earlier.
Most are startups, like XYpoint, AmikaNow!, Roku, ThinnAirApps, Everypath.com and Israeli companies GoSMS, Exalink and Passcall. Others, such as Microsoft Corp. and Spyglass Inc., have been around longer. Several more are developing solutions but remain behind non-disclosure agreements.
Because the primary goal is to make these services available now, most of these companies are concentrating on doing so using technology available today, such as text messaging on digital networks and Hypertext Markup Language of the Internet.
The text messaging/short message service idea is to gather Internet content and deliver the needed portions of it to existing wireless phones as text messages.
“I’m surprised we haven’t seen a lot more of this,” Armstrong said. “Content providers are all now looking to WAP. Why not look to SMS versions as well? You can hit 95 percent of the phones people have today as opposed to waiting for them to buy a new phone. It’s not going to stop WAP from growing; it’s simply making data available now.”
One company launching such a product at next week’s Wireless 2000 in New Orleans is XYpoint Inc.
“We believe enabling the devices currently available in the marketplace is the way to go,” said Tim Zenk, director of corporate communications at XYpoint. “SMS is an important concept and one dormant in the current network for some time.”
Israel’s GoSMS is pursuing a similar model.
“We’re not against WAP, but focused on the 40 million digital phones in the market today. People want Internet access with those phones,” Zenk said. “We built our business plan from the consumer up, and the consumer doesn’t have WAP phones. There’s no proof that they’re going to use WAP phones.”
Other alternative players focus on reconfiguring existing HTML Internet content for wireless devices.
Spyglass’ Prism technology makes content available to any device, regardless of format, be it iMode, WAP, simple text, HTML or others. Japan’s iMode service, for instance, is a wireless Internet solution that features color images and video today. It’s HTML-based and available today, although users have reported problems with service delays.
Everypath.com features a template model, which reads existing HTML content and fits the needed data to a template optimized for various types of wireless phones.
Microsoft’s Mobile Internet Explorer browser is HTML-based as well. It relies on filtering methods currently used by other standard Internet browsers, as well as some proprietary filtering methods.
Version 2.0 of the browser is dual-mode, supporting WAP. This is indicative of most other non-WAP alternatives. While each has its own means of delivering Internet data to wireless phones outside of, or in addition to, WAP technology, almost all have stated their intention to support WAP, once it becomes available.
Some, though, are also waiting for the technology to improve. In addition to WAP’s lack of availability, several of these alternate players have deep reservations of the technology itself.
Criticisms of WAP
“The customer experience and the user interface is the shortcoming of WAP,” Zenk said. “It’s clunky. It’s got to be simple and easy to use.”
Criticisms include the lack of an end-to-end security solution to enable e-commerce applications, open access to Internet content (WAP requires a gateway at the operator’s network, which could allow the operator to limit the content acquired from it) and the fact that Internet developers must write to WAP separately. WAP phones will not be able to access existing Internet sites.
“We continue to look at WAP and review it,” Zenk said. “If the user interface is improved and there are actually phones in the market, we’ll analyze it.”
But again, this process could take years, and the common denominator among WAP alternatives is the desire to enter the marketplace now.
“WAP is a catalyst,” said one industry insider who did not want to be identified. “In reality, it’s a stepping stone and not really much more than that.”
While it is true that another standard may replace WAP sometime in the future, these early-market alternatives are stepping stones in themselves. They may be used as early entry strategies, but remain only partial solutions. WAP sets itself apart as a full end-to-end solution, uniting all players involved in the service to a common standard.
In the meantime, while these WAP alternatives may be capitalizing on WAP’s popularity to an extent, their early emergence into the market likely will only further evangelize the growing wireless Internet space.
