Experts Advise Care in Deploying WAP
teledotcom.com
By Antone Gonsalves, TechWeb News
INDUSTRY ANALYSTS are cautioning corporate
information technology (IT) organizations to do their
homework before adopting Wireless Application
Protocol (WAP) for delivering Web services to a
mobile phone.
WAP has been getting less than positive reviews from
Europe, where the technology has been deployed in
countries like Sweden, Germany and the United
Kingdom.
Many consumers in Europe are nixing WAP phones,
saying there are too few services, and those that are
available are clunky and often busy.
Industry experts say most problems attributed to WAP,
introduced by Phone.com Inc. (Redwood City, Calif.),
L.M. Ericsson AB (Stockholm), Motorola Inc. and
Nokia OY (Espoo, Finland) in 1997, stem from
application design and not the technology. WAP works
best when only small amounts of data, preferably a few
words, are transmitted as the result of a proscribed
query that requires nothing more than the push of a
button on a mobile phone to activate.
"When people try to apply WAP in situations that
aren't appropriate, they're going to get some really bad
experiences," said Gerry Purdy, CEO of Mobile Insights
(Mountain View, Calif.), a research firm.
Therefore, analysts are telling enterprise clients to be
certain the application fits the technology. In the case of
delivering Web pages or complex data or services, a
personal digital assistant (PDA) instead of a mobile
phone might be better suited, as well as technologies
other than WAP.
Also, the enterprise should adopt open architectures
that allow the use of WAP as well as other wireless
protocols.
"Even if WAP is extremely successful, it's not going to
take over 100 percent of the market, so we would advise
people to try to go with a solution that will help them
remain open to different approaches over time," said
Peter O'Kelly, analyst for Patricia Seybold Group
(Boston).
As often happens with new technology that's overhyped
by vendors, WAP is suffering from a backlash caused by
deployments that have not lived up to expectations,
experts said.
"What you're seeing is something very common in
technology markets," said Carl Zetie, analyst for Giga
Information Group (Cambridge, Mass.). "First you have
the ridiculous overhyping, then you have the
disappointment and the backlash, and then eventually
you have the realistic take on what the technology is
good for."
WAP is expected to eventually be widely deployed in the
United States because of the broad support among
vendors supplying infrastructure or applications for
electronic commerce, such as IBM, SAP AG (Walldorf,
Germany) and BEA Systems Inc. (Sunnyvale, Calif.).
In addition, the Worldwide Web Consortium is
expected to incorporate WAP as part of its standards
process for extensible markup language (XML). WAP
delivers data to mobile devices in wireless markup
language (WML), a subset of XML. WAP's adoption by
the consortium would make the technology popular
among the enterprise, which prefers to use standardized
technology on the Internet, experts said.
"WAP is going to be the flavor of choice because it's
going to become an international standard," said Frank
Dzubeck, president of Communications Network
Architects (Washington, D.C.), a research firm.
Nevertheless, adoption among consumers has been slow
in Europe. The T-Mobil unit of Deutsche Telekom AG
reports 250,000 of its 13 million subscribers in German
have bought WAP-enabled handsets since November,
with 1.3 percent, or 175,000, actually using the service.
In contrast, NTT Mobile Communications Network Inc.
(NTT DoCoMo, Tokyo), a wireless provider in Japan,
reports that 4 percent of its subscribers are using its
Internet service, called i-mode, which the company
plans to launch in Europe.
Also, shipments of WAP phones from Nokia, Ericsson
and Motorola have fallen behind schedule in the past
year due to additional testing to make sure the phones
will work on global system for mobile communication
(GSM) networks. |
