The Hard Road
Ahead for WAP
Joseph Williams
B
ack in my professor
days I encouraged my
telecommunications
students to architect
wired networks for every device
that didn’t move and develop a
wireless strategy for connecting
those devices that did. Students
used to laugh at this advice—
after all, back then we struggled
just getting printers networked.
Recent “digital home” and “dig-
ital office” demonstration pro-
Although the wireless application
protocol shows great promise, to
succeed it must overcome many
inherent limitations.
jects by Cisco, Sun Microsys-
tems, and others have shown,
however, that we really are on
the verge of wiring pretty much
everything we can into Internet-
capable networks.
Similarly, all the recent mar-
ket enthusiasm for WAP (wire-
less application protocol) fore-
shadows a coming boom in net-
working wireless devices. Or
does it?
OOZING POTENTIAL
I won’t be coy: Wireless net-
working has monstrous poten-
tial.Today,more than 300 million
people use mobile phones
worldwide, with many analysts
predicting a billion users by
2003.Throw in pagers and PDAs
and you begin to appreciate the
market reach wireless devices
represent—and those devices
are just the tip of the iceberg.
72 IT Pro September ❘ October 2000
ternet space, many of which are
healthier than ever. Virtually
every cellular operator, tier 1
Internet service provider, and
portal is developing or deploy-
ing a wireless Internet product
offering.
So, jumping into a wireless
opportunity is the hot move,
right? Absolutely. And the
market is a slam-dunk, right?
Well, maybe not.
TOO SMALL TO SURF
To put WAP in context, the
current play in the wireless
Internet market is to deliver
Internet-driven content to a
mobile device. Unfortunately, it
isn’t clear what kind of Internet-
driven content will sell to the
mobile user, who may be con-
What do you get when you fined to a six-line display only 13
marry millions of Internet users characters long. Nevertheless,
to a billion wireless users? A ideas abound. You’ll soon get
wireless Internet opportunity news, messaging, banking, and
that finally validates the mantra directory services such as yellow
of “any device, anytime, any- pages through your mobile
where.” Leverage the wireless device. It might also link to loca-
Internet into the digital home, tion-dependent services such as
digital automobile, and digital instant coupons and, for exam-
business, and you get a prospec- ple, directions to the nearest
tus that makes even the most Continued on page 70
jaded Sand Hill Road
venture capitalist hyper-
ventilate. Evolving
The buzz in Silicon Technologies
Valley has been that
any research proposal In this new column, I intend to
this year with the word highlight innovative technologies
“wireless” in it got pri- that may impact your work in the
ority funding at the big next few months. If you have ideas
NASDAQ firms. Nor or would like to submit a column,
did the spring crash contact me at joseph.williams@
of the dot-com market sun.com. –Joseph Williams
damage companies ac-
tive in the wireless In-
1520-9202/00/$10.00 © 2000 IEEE
 E V O LV I N G TECHNOLOGIES
Continued from page 72

miniaturization to enhance mobility

How WAP Works and convenience works at cross-pur-
poses with providing user-friendly
WAP is the emerging platform for delivering wireless Internet activity.
Web content to the mobile device.At its simplest, WAP suffers from another poten-
WAP provides a protocol for using traditional tial physical problem: It can take you
HTTP to transport WML (Wireless Markup 10 keystrokes to enter four characters
Language) content through a WAP gateway to a on a cell phone, so imagine how diffi-
mobile device capable of displaying and interact- cult it would be to use that phone to
ing with that content. WAP delivers a 1,400-byte enter a 35-character URL. Mobile
payload, also known as a deck, that consists of a device makers seek to circumvent this
series of connected menus, called cards, that users limitation by facilitating the synchro-
navigate through to select the content or services nization of address books and book-
they want delivered to their mobile device. marks with their users’ personal and
WAP supports graphics and a wide variety of messaging environments. laptop computers, but even this solu-
It also provides connection security between communicating parties who tion would make spontaneous surfing
use Wireless Transport Layer Security (WTLS), which supports privacy, quite an endeavor.
data integrity, and authentication while providing some denial-of-service
protection. AN UNWIRED GOLD RUSH
Despite these limitations, vendors
have surged into the marketplace
astride several revenue models for a
pizza place. As a practical matter, program in than straight HTML. The wireless Internet built upon WAP, as
however, these services really haven’t challenge comes in delivering valu- shown in Figure 2. Handset vendors
generated much interest—so far. able content in a format suitable for strive to sell WAP-capable phones,
At the recent WAP Forum meeting viewing in a display-restricted mobile with some of the more ambitious
in Beverly Hills, participants widely environment. Doing so is a nontrivial among them seeking as well to lock
acknowledged that WAP lacks the exercise. A 12-Kbyte e-mail message consumers into a WAP gateway the
killer app guaranteed to snare mobile that displays comfortably on a 21-inch handset vendor controls. The mobile
users, nor is one likely to be devel- computer monitor would overwhelm device carrier networks want to sell
oped anytime soon. Without a killer a mobile phone’s 6-line screen and airtime and lock consumers into the
app, the technology must provide a limited memory, as Figure 1 clearly carrier’s WAP gateway. Several con-
suite of services sufficient by them- shows. Similarly, an airline reservation tent aggregators plan to sell and resell
selves to attract subscribers. search that lists 10 alternatives on an original and third-party content
WAP is fairly easy to understand airport kiosk will not display easily on directly to mobile operators, device
and its wireless markup language, any handheld mobile device. The manufacturers, and end users.
WML, is scarcely more difficult to handset vendors’ drive for device A limitless number of third-party
content providers are trying to sell
content into the WAP market. Several
Circulation: IT Professional (ISSN 1520-9202) is published bimonthly by the IEEE Computer major carriers have already deployed
Society. IEEE Headquarters, Three Park Avenue, 17th Floor, New York, NY 10016-5997; IEEE WAP-enabled product offerings. AT
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More than a million WML pages
Postmaster: Send address changes and undelivered copies to IT Professional, IEEE Service can already be found on the Internet.
Center, 445 Hoes Lane, Piscataway, NJ 08855. Periodicals Postage Paid at New York, N.Y., and at Nevertheless, despite all the economic
additional mailing offices. Canadian GST #125634188. Canada Post Publications Mail (Canadian players in the WAP game and all the
Distribution) Agreement Number 1445669. Printed in USA.
WAP content already in play, it’s still
Editorial: Unless otherwise stated, bylined articles, as well as product and service descriptions, far too early to tell whether this par-
reflect the author’s or firm’s opinion. Inclusion in IT Professional ticular technology will succeed.
does not necessarily constitute endorsement by the IEEE or the
Computer Society. All submissions are subject to editing for style,
Success is always fleeting in the early
clarity, and space. stages of a technology’s deployment,
and WAP is no exception. Far from
being a mature technology, WAP will

70 IT Pro September ❘ October 2000

 Figure 1. With only
six display lines
and limited memory,
a cell phone
makes a poor
Web browser.
© Nokia Corporation 2000
need considerable development be-
fore it becomes a fully developed stan-
dard. Dominated by members from
Nokia, Ericsson, and Phone.com, the
WAP Forum’s leadership (http://www.
wapforum.org/), while capable, pur-
sues industry agendas that some have
criticized for being too self-interested.
WIRELESS ≠ WAP
What about all the mobile users in
Europe and Asia? Aren’t they living
proof that WAP flourishes? Actually,
no. European mobile users currently
use SMS (short messaging service)
services that do not rely on WAP.
Europe generates two billion SMS
messages monthly, which shows the
wireless-messaging market’s undeni-
able potential. However,WAP has yet
to establish itself in that market.
Many now believe that WAP won’t
Figure 2. Major players in the
WAP content market.
Customer care
and billing
services
Mobile
operators
Device
manufacturers
User
be able to compete until carriers and
handset vendors migrate from their
current low-bandwidth 9.6-Kbps GSM
networks to the new 114-Kbps GPRS
networks. NTT DoCoMo’s wildly suc-
cessful program in Japan does not rely
on WAP, but instead uses the com-
pany’s proprietary i-mode technology.
In short, WAP remains an unproven
technology. Even Phone.com employs
a proprietary technology, HDML
(Handheld Device Markup Lan-
guage), that does not use standardized
WML. So the apparent wireless Inter-
net successes are not yet WAP-related.
BARBED-WIRELESS FENCES
WAP’s ultimate problem may be
that the technology’s champions seem
committed to locking their sub-
scribers into WAP gateways that only
provide a vendor-selected set of ser-
vices. All WAP-enabled handsets
come with a carrier-defined IP ad-
dress for their WAP gateway. Most of
these handsets allow for a second pro-
grammable IP address for a WAP
gateway, but this second IP address is
often either unavailable to the sub-
scriber or difficult to program in.
AOL once tried to isolate its users
from accessing the Internet, which
proved to be a poor strategic move
because customers demanded the
freedom to surf outside AOL’s sand-
box. Thus, it’s doubtful that cellular
carriers will succeed by locking their
Portals
ASPs
Aggregators M-commerce
Finance
Integrators
subscribers into a limited WAP expe-
rience or by making it difficult for
them to surf the Internet.
A
m I suggesting that WAP is
doomed to fail? Absolutely not.
The technology has great
potential and an excellent chance to
dominate the wireless Internet market
for at least the next 18 to 24 months, if
NTT DoCoMo keeps i-mode to itself.
The wireless Internet is inevitable;
whether WAP will emerge as the tech-
nology that enables it is problematic.
Just as it did with the dot-coms, the
market will eventually demand that
WAP-oriented startups produce prof-
itable results. It’s unlikely that WAP
will be given much time to produce
these profits, especially if competing
and complementary technologies like
mobile IP and Java-enabled phones
swiftly displace it. ■
Joseph Williams is Practice Manager,
Americas, for Sun Microsystems’ Ad-
vanced Internet Practice group. The-
information presented here represents
the author’s opinions and not those
of Sun Microsystems Inc. Contact
Williams at joseph.williams@sun.com.
September ❘ October 2000 IT Pro 71