WAP Is Dead...Long Live WAP! - More Thoughts

by Robert Hellstrom

Editor's Note: I felt the following reply to our WAP Is Dead...Long Live WAP! raised several interesting points and the author agreed to have his thoughts published for the world to see. Robert can be reached at hellstromr@gol.com.

I have used both WAP and cHTML technologies and have been demonstrated technologies that borrow from both (eg. WAP with KJava). My concern with the current version of WAP is in its inability to inspire the subscriber base of the contemporary public mobile telecommunications operator. WAP is a success of modern technical committee-based design, taking around 3 years to wind its way to where it is today. Much good thought it behind it, especially so in the lower stack layers. Perhaps it is the highest layers that cause so much of the debate. I do have real concern with taking any standard or de-facto standard at a point in time and assigning it as useless.

I believe a good technical design in general should pay some tribute to the original requirement for it. The time WAP has taken to come into being may have contributed to current debate over its usefulness. Indeed also the very fact that WAP aspires to provide value not to one business or industry group but to a general concoction of industries linked only by some form of wireless communication broadcast or otherwise.

I hope that public mobile telecommunications operators can use the technology at some point and obtain real profit from it. Given there is nothing in WAP that could not have been designed 3 or 4 years ago, how much revenue have operators lost to date? The Japanese telco industry with all its differences took control of the situtation and produced their own industry with 3 different mark-up languages and a variety of packet and circuit-switched access and billing on a variety of wireless networks. For 1.5 years they have been providing services and gaining premium profits whilst marketing to the masses, not just the early adopters.

There are too many lessons to learn from Japan to ignore. Nonsensical to the design of WAP is the low-bandwidth (9.6kbps) concomitant with 256 colour and GIF animation and MIDI sound. All with no compression on the bearer. It seems at first glance that too much information is being sent over too thin a bearer. However the real achievement here is balance. They have finely balanced handset capability, eg. CPU speed, memory, etc, and bearer bandwidth and IP latency to achieve a consistent valuable service that subscribers actually want and use often.

But the biggest lesson is not technical, it is the fact that ultimately operators have to give the users what they want. Can WAP do this? Eventually, but just not now to a mass market in a compelling manner. Phone.Com has recently announced colour support to their proprietary HDML. A WAP handset that was claimed to be the first WAPForum-certified interoperable WAP handset also supports GIF in what is a proprietary enhancement. Certainly there are problems today in various approaches.

As we support operators who have both WAP and HDML and CHTML strategies we have no alternative but to support all and support migration and roaming strategies that these operators have. At the moment cHTML might be the favoured horse because it provides differentiation and a clear standards path to 3G, but WAP needs work to get there and soon.

How much more revenue can operators afford to lose by not having compelling services? How many compromises must content providers make to deliver some semblance of their material? And lastly, what was it operators are trying to do anyway? Imagine as an operator you want colour animation. How long will that take the WAP Forum? Do you have the time to then wait for the handsets? Without answering these sort of questions we cannot have useful debate over the merits of any technology, I think, as you will always be able to justify any technology by inventing a useful purpose no matter how unproven. A cry for market research?