Most in the wireless industry are convinced that for wireless Internet access to succeed wireless operators have to tear down their current walled-garden plans that limit customer access to a set number of wirelessly enabled Web sites. Some wireless operators have heeded said advice and introduced search engines allowing subscribers to peer beyond the walls and view Web sites of their choosing.
Verizon Wireless, the country’s largest wireless operator, announced a deal in March with Pinpoint to provide wireless search capabilities allowing customers access to any Web site that is wirelessly enabled. At the time, Verizon said the announcement would foster an “open, wireless environment.”
Fellow CDMA operator Sprint PCS followed suit last week, announcing a deal with Mountain View, Calif.-based Google Inc. to provide its search engine capability to Sprint PCS’ wireless Web. According to Sprint PCS, the search capability will increase the number of sites accessible from its service from 130 to more than 1.3 billion sites, or virtually every Web site Google can find.
“It’s not just about opening up the walled garden,” said Nancy Sheerer, spokeswoman for Sprint PCS. “It’s allowing our customers to view all Internet pages from the Sprint Wireless Web.”
The service also allows users to search and browse 2.2 million WAP-ready Web pages and conduct searches for specific content within the Sprint PCS Wireless Web menu, also known as its walled garden.
Unlike Pinpoint’s search engine, Google’s search capability can access any Web site regardless of whether it is WAP-enabled or written in a code specific to wireless devices. Acting as a middleware solution, Google’s intelligent search technology automatically converts HyperText Markup Language Web pages, the standard for the Internet, into a format optimized for WAP phones.
David Krane, spokesman for Google, noted the search functionality for wireless devices is the same the company uses for its desktop search engine. The company first announced its wireless capability last year.
Google claims to have the largest index of Web sites on the Internet and has agreements to use its search engine on other search engine Web sites including Yahoo!, AOL/Netscape and Cisco Systems. The company also has recently announced partnerships with Handspring, Palm Inc., Vodafone Group plc and NTT DoCoMo. According to Media Matrix, Google is currently the fourth-most popular search engine on the Web, handling more than 40 million searches daily.
Unlike Internet sites specifically written to WAP, Google strips HTML sites of extraneous graphics, allowing only the text content to show on the wireless device. While the technology allows any Internet site to be viewed on a wireless device, if a site is written without wireless access in mind, the site’s translation can be confusing to navigate.
Google also provides streamlined text input, allowing users to enter numbers for universal resource locator addresses. If a users enters in the numbers corresponding to a Web address, intelligence built into the search engine will return an address it thinks the user is looking for, and ask if it is the correct guess before accessing the site.
While wireless operators continue to exploit the revenue-generating aspects of walled-garden models for wireless Internet access, the recent moves to open up that garden show they may be willing to give up some short-term gain for greater consumer acceptance of the service.
