The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition -- June 22, 2000
Personal Technology
U.S. Service Providers Need
To Improve Wireless Access
By DAVID HAMILTON
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
WIRELESS ACCESS to the Internet, widely expected to be the next big thing technologically, is
an area in which the U.S. is a real backwater. Millions of Japanese and European users are busily
surfing the Web on data-enabled cell phones, while many Americans are unaware such services
even exist.
Now, a handful of cellular providers in the U.S. have started to take a stab at wireless Internet
services. It's not hard to see why, as mobile Web access sounds pretty nifty in theory. The promise
of wireless Web service, after all, is nothing less than instant technogratification: immediate access
to up-to-date movie listings and news, anywhere-anytime access to e-mail, or the ability to check
out a Web site when you're not at your desk.
Unfortunately, U.S. services don't yet come close to delivering on that promise. The one I tested,
offered by Sprint Corp.'s PCS unit, did allow me to retrieve simple information and even to shop a
bit without too much effort. But the user interface is barely suitable for human use, and the service
was marred by technical glitches that rendered it little more than a curiosity -- and an annoying one,
at that.
THIS ISN'T ENTIRELY Sprint's fault. The technical limitations of today's cellular networks
mean data move at painfully slow speeds. The Sprint network, for instance, crawls at a pace of
only 14.4 kilobits per second, or about one-fourth the speed of a common 56 kilobit modem.
U.S. mobile Web surfers also don't have untrammeled access to the Internet. Sprint's service, like
many others based on a standard called the Wireless Application Protocol, or WAP, blocks
access to sites that haven't rewritten their pages in the special WAP format -- one that is purely
text-based. That limits wireless Internet users to a fraction of all Web sites, and reduces the Web to
gray menus of tiny letters and numbers.
It gets worse, but first let's look at how the service works in practice. Starting up the service, which
requires a special Web-enabled cell phone, involves selecting an option unhelpfully labeled
"Minibrowser" from the phone's main menu. In each of the three phones I tested on the service, the
minibrowser option was buried in the middle of the menu, requiring four or five button pushes just
to find it.
The Sprint Internet service also has to be explicitly dialed up for each use. That makes just starting
the service a chore that can take as long as 10 seconds. Airtime charges start mounting as soon as
you activate the browser.
The next disappointment is the cell phone's "home page," which is little
more than a short list of preselected Web sites that Sprint can rearrange at
will, partly because of deals with the site owners. During the two weeks I
tried the service, Sprint bumped Yahoo! to position five from position two.
In its place went a placeholder for a future Sprint e-mail service and
America Online, which is only useful if you're an AOL subscriber. There's
no way to rearrange this menu, leaving users at the mercy of Sprint's
financial interests.
Even the text-based menu can be a pain to read on the tiny screens of
current wireless-Web cell phones. They only display four to seven lines of
text, each only 14 to 16 characters wide. As a result, any text longer than a
couple of words has to be scrolled across the screen like an electronic
news ticker; it can take six to eight seconds just to read a headline such as, "FTC to Probe Soaring
Midwest Gas Prices."
THAT SAID, the Web sites Sprint chose do offer some useful services. AOL, Yahoo, Bloomberg
and Fidelity all provide ways to check stock quotes or news headlines. If you have an account with
either Yahoo or AOL, you can also send and receive e-mail, although it's frustrating to read
messages 12 words at a time. Entering text is no fun, either, because it requires pushing the phone's
number keys repeatedly in order to pick individual letters -- say, pushing the "7" key four times to
get an "S." Capitals and punctuation -- like "@" or periods -- require users to navigate a separate,
and confusing, menu.
It's also possible to shop online using Amazon.com (position No. 4), although that process isn't
without its glitches, either. The first time I surfed to Amazon, the site asked me to sign on, but
refused to accept the user name and password for my existing account. On subsequent visits,
however, the site recognized me immediately, which let me make one-click CD purchases while
wandering the aisles of a local Virgin Records.
Still, the sheer number of technical problems or design shortcomings grew tiresome. In the heart of
Silicon Valley, I flipped on a PCS phone to get directions home. No go -- the phone insisted I was
no longer on Sprint's digital network. Once on the highway and the digital connection restored, I
pulled over and punched through menus for up-to-date traffic information. Again, no luck. While
Yahoo offers that service on its regular site, it hasn't yet WAP-enabled the data.
Worst of all, at one point I managed to totally disable the Internet function on one phone by going
through a seemingly innocuous settings menu. Sprint, which had to reset the phone, said most users
won't be able to access that menu.
The company acknowledges that it's still learning what users want, and has vowed to improve
speeds, eliminate the dial-up lag, and let users customize start-up menus. Until it does so, wireless
Internet access in the U.S. is likely to remain little more than a high-priced toy.
-- --Walt Mossberg returns next week.
Write to David Hamilton at david.hamilton@wsj.com |
