WAP Forum Meeting Tackles Interoperability
By Vanessa Clark
15 September 1999
WAP Forum members used this week's London meeting as an opportunity to showcase products and services set to transform mobile phones into Internet access devices.
And as the first operators begin rolling out WAP services, interoperability between the gateway, browser and handset was high on the agenda of the forum's meeting.
The WAP Forum has recruited The Open Group to set up a system to check interoperability of WAP 1.1 devices and give them a seal of approval. "Interoperability and compliance is extremely important as new services and products using WAP1.1 are being launched," said a WAP Forum spokesman. "We need to make sure all these products work together."
Other topics to be tackled this week include smartcard interfaces, push technology, billing interfaces and cacheing technology - all set to be features of the next version of the protocol, WAP1.2. As the protocol develops the group plans more contact with the World Wide Web Consortium to align WAP's evolution with that of the Internet's.
Also on the agenda this week is the end-to-end security of WAP services especially with the expected popularity of banking and e-commerce type services using the mobile phone.
To this end, Baltimore Technologies today launched W/SECURE, a software development kit which will allow developers to build security into their systems. The SDK lets developers take advantage of the Wireless Transaction Layer Security (WTLS) layer of WAP, to permit secure encrypted sessions between online networked applications. It also uses Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) to offer authentication using digital certificates. Apion, the developers of a WAP gateway, is Baltimore's first customer.
Forum members demonstrated aspects of network infrastructure including wireless application protocol gateways, security layers and unified messaging platforms to end-user services like banking, brokerage and traffic reports. Exhibitors included Apion, Angelica Wireless, Aspiro, CMG Telecommunications, Comverse Network Systems, Ericsson, Dr Materna, Orange, Peramon Technology, Phone.com, Siemens, Yomi Media Oy/Hewlett Packard and Razorfish.
The WAP Forum is an industry alliance of vendors, operators and content providers working to allow access to the Internet via mobile phones. The forum also announced it now has over 180 members. It announced today that it has over 180 members.
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