The Wireless Application Forum held its latest members meeting last week in Dallas, convening this
time to determine its road map for the coming year and into the next century.
The meeting marked a transition from
a focus on primarily technology issues to more of a strategic vision, perhaps the greatest indication yet that the WAP
effort is nearing a commercial reality.
First, the group announced an expanded membership. Totaling 78 members
just two weeks ago, the forum announced several new members have joined to increase its ranks to 91. The only
announced new name was Lucent Technologies Inc. Chuck Parrish, chairman of the WAP Forum board of directors,
said the addition was significant in that Lucent has experience with many of the major standards-setting bodies in the
world. As WAP aims to be standards-independent and is in discussions with such organizations as the International
Telecommunication Union and the European Telecommunications Standards Institute to accomplish this, Lucent’s
expertise is welcomed, Parrish said.
“Lucent’s background as a player in every global wireless standard makes
it a valuable addition to the WAP Forum’s membership,” he said.
The names of other new members should be
released in about a month, he said.
The group also introduced formal interoperability tests among WAP
manufacturers, a necessary step for commercial deployment.
“Our No. 1 priority going forward is
interoperability,” Parrish said. “We have interoperability testing with several companies now and are
making good progress. Work needs to be done, but it’s progressing very well. There are a few bugs to be worked out,
but that’s whey we do it.”
He said he expects to see WAP products commercially available by this spring. As
such, the organization will start to encourage application developers to join the fold, something that hasn’t been a
priority to date.
“We’ve purposely not made a big encouragement to application developers because the
products were not ready for them,” Parrish said. “We’re close enough now that those products are coming
quickly.”
Parrish said WAP plans to attract developers by establishing a special class of membership for them.
He said to expect that effort to begin in the next few months.
Looking a little further into the future, Parrish said the
WAP Forum will address seriously the problem of convergence with standard Web sites by concentrating on
convergence with next-generation Hypertext Markup Language, in conjunction with the World Wide Web
Consortium.
“We’re working with W3C to have our technologies converge in a year or two,” he said.
Such convergence could allow WAP protocol devices to access standard HTML-written Web sites. Today WAP
devices can only access information from Web sites written specifically to the WAP specification. Discussions with the
W3C to date have resulted in a white paper concerning the mobile Internet access problem, published on the WAP
Forum Web site.
How WAP devices access the Internet has become a significant issue. Microsoft Corp. announced
in October its intention to create a competing microbrowser that can access standard HTML sites and filter the
information specifically for mobile handsets.
“We’d like to see Microsoft join forces with WAP,”
Parrish said. “We’re not anxious to see a Betamax vs. VHS kind of situation.”
