As the United States gears up for the commercial launch of Wireless Application Protocol services, the question of interoperability between WAP vendors has become an increasing concern to carriers looking to offer Internet-based services on a variety of handsets.
WAP exists as a standard that should allow a phone equipped with a Nokia Corp. microbrowser to access services through a WAP server from Phone.com. At one point, analysts and carriers said there was some difficulty achieving this.
Nokia and Phone.com said that problem has been solved. Phone.com said Australian carrier Telstra, which uses a Phone.com WAP server, has deployed Nokia phones with no glitches.
“Nokia phones work perfectly with our gateway now,” said Ben Linder, vice president of marketing at Phone.com.
“The interoperability testing is ongoing, and we’re making good progress,” said Haroon Alvi, Nokia director of business development. “There are some areas where there are issues … but we’re confident they’ll be resolved.”
However, the interoperability achieved to date is limited to basic WAP services. Looking to differentiate its WAP product offerings, Phone.com has added proprietary extensions to its WAP server that only phones with its microbrowser can access. This means phones with standard WAP microbrowsers from Nokia or others can access basic WAP services from the server, but only UP.Browser WAP phones can access the full range of advanced features.
“They have features in their servers that are not in the standard,” said Alvi. “A WAP-standard browser would not have that ability.”
Phone.com said this allows it to compete on the quality of its WAP solutions.
“Every manufacturer wants to differentiate their phones,” Linder said. “Despite the differentiation, the basic applications will work with all phones. But some sites may choose to specialize to a phone or excel on each phone individually … Every site should work on every phone, but may just work better on certain phones if they choose that.”
However, analysts say there is a fine line between differentiating a product and creating a proprietary solution.
“Everybody is in a race for better solutions and ignoring interoperability,” said Hamad Rashid, director of software engineering at Zsigo Wireless Data Consultants Inc. “There will be a solution for the base level of implementation. But that does not help carriers looking for the feature-rich solutions.”
The possibility of tiered WAP services worry some analysts.
“My worst-case scenario is that you and I have the same carrier and different WAP phones. We get to talking one day and you find out my WAP phone can do more than yours. How’s that going to make you feel?” asked Andrew Seybold, wireless data analyst and editor of Andrew Seybold’s Outlook. “I don’t think it’ll fly for a minute. The whole idea of the WAP Forum is that everything must be interoperable.”
Carriers in particular agree. They don’t like the idea of some phones having a basic level of interoperability and other having more. One carrier testing WAP solutions, which did not want to be named, said it discovered WAP gateways from individual vendors are best optimized for the handsets of that same vendor.
“That’s definitely an issue that needs to be worked out,” said a spokesperson. “I don’t think proprietary solutions are the right way to go. The more products we can offer consumers, the better. Obviously you want to offer those products with as many features as possible.”
Even without these proprietary extensions, a certain degree of interoperability challenges would exist, due to the nature of standardization language.
“There’s always some ambiguity to the language,” said Nokia’s Alvi. “So far, our WAP gateway is as close as we can make it to the WAP standard.”
While WAP exists as a standard, the rather vague nature of it leaves room for engineers interpret it differently and implement it in their own ways. That causes other interoperability issues.
“It depends on how detailed the specification is, but most are not detailed enough,” said Michael Buhrmann, president of @Mobile Inc., an applications service provider and member of the WAP Forum. “Standards are usually specified to a good-enough level.”
The original WAP specification, for instance, did not define what technology was mandatory and what was optional. While that has been remedied, other issues remain.
“WAP does not identify a unique characteristic for identifying each phone,” said Zsigo’s Rashid. “If something requires knowledge of a subscriber ID and you’re using a browser that doesn’t know that, then you won’t get your data.”
Additionally, developers may write a WAP application that requires the use of two soft keys on a phone, which would present a problem to those using phones with only one soft key.
These issues are common with any industry implementing a new technology.
“When you first bring something into the market, some things just don’t work right because you develop interoperability issues,” Buhrmann said. “They find it once, they fix it, it’s done. There’s an adoption curve for any new technology.”
In the early days of the Internet, some sites were accessible only by Netscape browsers and other by Internet explorer.
“When Netscape first came down, it didn’t work on every PC,” Buhrmann said. “These were interoperability issues between Netscape and the operating system of the PC. Now, it will work with almost anything.”
However, the wireless industry hasn’t the luxury of time the Internet did to work out its problems.
“We have different market here,” Rashid said. “If Phone.com were to add a new feature, are competitors out copying it at the same speed? I think not.”
Seybold and others believe next generation Internet technology like eXtensible Markup Language could evolve to the point where it could make WAP obsolete. WAP can avoid this by securing a strong foothold in the marketplace now, becoming so pervasive that it won’t matter if another solution comes along.
Inventors have created a more efficient keyboard layout, for instance, that would allow users to type much faster than the traditional Qwerty layout, but the Qwerty method is so well-established that it would be impossible to replace.
With this in mind, the WAP Forum created the WAP Interoperability Group to resolve many of these issues. Analyst say the industry has come a long way since WAP first emerged.
“They’ve understood that they have to create a working group and focus on these issues more,” Rashid said.
The WIG has created both static and dynamic conformance tests and has a instituted a certification process. Additionally, WAP services have not even been launched in the U.S. yet, giving the domestic industry the advantage of learning from the actions of their counterparts abroad.
“The good news is that the problems will be worked out in Japan and Europe before they roll out here.” Linder said.
Overall, confidence remain high that the industry will resolve these interoperability issues.
“I think it will come together,” Rashid said. “The group will eventually have good testing and a good reference set. I think It will work out.”
But key to this is for carriers to push the demand for interoperable services.
“Carriers have a large role to play to ensure interoperability occurs,” Buhrmann said. “The carriers want to offer the customers a choice of phones. (Interoperability) always gets solved by carriers driving the resolution so they can have choice.”
