WAP-> What is WAP?

The Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) is a hot topic that has been widely hyped in the mobile industry and outside of it. WAP is simply a protocol- a standardized way that a mobile phone talks to a server installed in the mobile phone network. It is amazing how in just six months, it has become imperative for all Information Technology companies in Nordic countries and beyond to have a WAP division. Many many advertising agencies and "dot.coms" have announced WAP services.

Figure 1

All Web servers can communicate with a variety of information sources, using a number of different integration tools and protocols, for example a Web server can serve pages of information that are generated by tools such as Active Server Pages (ASP), ColdFusion, or PHP. Database integration is achieved using protocols such as CGI (the Common Gateway Interface) or, more likely,ODBC, as Figure 2 illustrates.

Figure 2

WAP is hot for several reasons:

1. It provides a standardized way of linking the Internet to mobile phones, thereby linking two of the hottest industries anywhere.

2. Its founder members include the major wireless vendors of Nokia, Ericsson and Motorola, plus a newcomer Phone.com.

3. By April 2000, the WAP Forum had over 350 member companies.

4. Mobile information services, a key application for WAP, have not been as successful as many network operators expected. WAP is seen as a way to rectify this situation.

WAP also has its detractors and controversies:

1. It is very difficult to configure WAP phones for new WAP services, with 20 or so different parameters needing to be entered to gain access to a WAP service.

2. Compared with the installed base of Short Message Service (SMS) compliant phones, the relative number of handsets supporting WAP is tiny.

3. WAP is a protocol that runs on top of an underlying bearer. None of the existing GSM bearers for WAP- the Short Message Service (SMS), Unstructured Supplementary Services Data (USSD) and Circuit Switched Data (CSD) are optimized for WAP.

4. The WAP standard is incomplete, with key elements such as Push (proactive sending of information to mobile devices) and wireless telephony (updating address reports and the like) included in the WAP 1.2, standardized in late 1999 and first expected to be implemented in the Spring of 2000. 

5. 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 the pending acquisition of APiON by Phone.com.

6. Other protocols such as SIM Application Toolkit and Mobile Station Application Execution Environment (MexE) are respectively already widely supported or designed to supercede WAP.

7. WAP services are expected to be expensive to use since the tendency is to be on-line for a long Circuit Switched Data (CSD) call as features such as interactivity and selection of more information are used by the end user. Without specific tariff initiatives, there are likely to be some surprised WAP users when they see their mobile phone bill for the first time after starting using WAP.

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