The Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) had the biggest coming-out party of its 20-month lifespan during Telecom ’99 in Geneva, with more than 100 carriers, vendors and content providers displaying WAP and WAP-related products-warts and all.
While WAP’s momentum has grown all year, many consider Telecom ’99 the beginning of a shift from the development stage to the deployment stage.
“It wasn’t just one company. More than 100 were showing WAP or WAP-related products, and that’s what created the buzz,” said Greg Williams, chairman of the WAP Forum and vice president of wireless networks at U.S.-based SBC Communications Inc. “I think if we could have had more WAP handsets to put in people’s hands, it could have been more. The one complaint I heard is that it’s too hard to get devices.”
To best gauge the growing interest in the standard, one can look to the building interest in the developer community.
Zsigo Wireless Data Consultants Inc.-a U.S-based firm that provides training programs and products on WAP and other wireless data technology for developers-recently introduced its first WAP training CD and plans to introduce a WAP certification test soon.
Konstantin Zsigo, the company’s president, said interest in WAP training has skyrocketed among developers. “We’re sending CDs all around the world. `If people want training, that’s an indicator … Developers are not too speculative. They go either where they’re told or where the money is.”
But that’s not to say carriers and vendors can just sit back and wait for the applications to roll in. In their haste to get WAP phones and network servers into the marketplace, vendors have introduced WAP products that are not fully compatible with WAP products from other companies, a problem not unnoticed at the Geneva show.
Although the WAP Forum has set compatibility standards, not all have been met. The standard is solid, analysts say; however, vendors need to work on how to implement it.
Hamad Rashid, director of software engineering at Zsigo, said a WAP-enabled phone made by Nokia, for instance, has some difficulty interacting with an UP.Link WAP server made by Phone.com.
“There certainly are some issues,” he said. “I think what happened here is that products were rushed to market. We’ll see improvement in the next couple of months.” He expects WAP products from competing companies will achieve 95-percent interoperability soon.
However, there is another level to the interoperability issue-that of applications. Ideally, an applications developer should be able to write one WAP application that can be implemented on all WAP servers, regardless of manufacturer. But that is not always the case.
“We know the goal is for full interoperability and device independence, but we don’t think that’s going to happen in the short term at all,” Zsigo said.
Already, some developers are writing WAP applications specific to a certain phone or carrier, and they become garbled or totally inaccessible to others.
“If they make it to a specific handset, it might be something not universal to all,” said the WAP Forum’s Williams. “That’s where I think the problem could occur.”
Additionally, some carriers are offering customized WAP training specific to their network. Nextel Communications is expected announce a specialized WAP training program in conjunction with Zsigo, the first of many such expected training offers.
“You’re going to see a lot of offshoots there,” Zsigo said. “People are looking for differentiation. Nextel is gambling that WAP on their network is better than WAP on others.”
Williams said the WAP Forum is considering a proposal to create a style guide for developers at the next board meeting, and currently has an interoperability group that tests devices against various services and content. He said the forum hopes to eventually implement a WAP branding program to ensure any product or service stamped with the WAP logo will be completely interoperable with any other.
