Plagued by Inconsistency,
WAP Services Are a Flop
By ALMAR LATOUR
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
STOCKHOLM -- For Johan Lenander, the moment of truth about WAP
came at the worst possible moment.
Mr. Lenander, the chief executive of Swedish gaming company Picofun
AB, was about to show a crowd of reporters how a new online game,
PicoFootball, worked on a WAP phone. But when he tested the phone
just 10 minutes before the news conference was to start, he got a nasty jolt:
He couldn't connect to the portal he needed.
Furious, Mr. Lenander called the phone
operator involved -- Europolitan AB of
Sweden -- and threatened to cancel his
company's accounts if the problem wasn't
fixed immediately. Europolitan quickly solved the problem, and Mr.
Lenander was able to demonstrate how PicoFootball worked. But sweat
was still running from his temples as he spoke, and after the event he freely
vented his frustration. "It's an outrage," he said. "We're launching WAP
games, and they can't even keep their WAP gateway up and running."
Can this be the WAP we've heard so much about?
WAP -- short for Wireless Application Protocol -- is meant to allow
advanced mobile phones to tool around a subset of the Internet. The hype
surrounding the technology has been phenomenal. A quick flip through the
technology sections of glossy news magazines gives a flavor, in ad after ad
trumpeting the dawn of the WAP era. "Thanks to WAP," says a current
full-page advertisement by Motorola Inc., "information like the latest news,
stocks & shares, weather, sports results and entertainment can all be
available simply at the touch of a button." But the Motorola ad also carries
a cautionary footnote: WAP services are "not available in all areas," it says.
No, WAP is not available in all areas. In fact, the much-touted technology
is today caught in a spasm of unexpected hiccups and headaches. Handset
makers, including Nokia Corp., Telefon AB L.M. Ericsson and Motorola,
have fallen behind in promised deliveries of WAP phones. Wireless
operators have yet to get a large number of WAP services up and running.
And WAP-phone owners often find that what services are available are
either clunky to use or constantly busy. Far from the zippy Web experience
that the industry's publicists have promised, WAP is all too often a story of
overloaded computers, a few unimaginative services and a couple of lines
of slow-moving text on a screen half the size of a credit card. Not a few
users are asking why they spent more than 600 euros apiece for their
handsets.
Just how disappointing is WAP? A couple of numbers from Deutsche
Telekom AB's T-Mobil unit tell the story: The typical owner of a WAP
handset uses it to access the Internet less than once a week, T-Mobil says.
The figures -- the first usage numbers released by a European mobile
provider -- show that just over 1% of T-Mobil's total wireless subscribers
use WAP services. Anecdotal evidence bears out the numbers. From
Sweden to Germany to the U.K., consumers are saying that they can't see
any compelling reason to use WAP services regularly. "WAP services are
just impossible to use right now," says Roger Jansson, an analyst at Redeye
AB, a high-tech research firm in Stockholm. Adds Lars Waagstein, analyst
with Jupiter Communications in Stockholm: "This was a flop year for
WAP. Before it can take off, there needs to be a broader user base, better
services, and packet-switch networks."
None of this means that WAP won't eventually triumph and transform the
mobile-phone business. Many of the current disappointments, after all, are
reminiscent of mainstream Europe's first awkward forays onto the Internet
five years ago. But for now, the digerati seem distinctly underwhelmed.
Pernilla Hederstrom, a 23-year-old marketing specialist from Stockholm,
bought a WAP phone so she could handle her e-mail on the go. Receiving
e-mail is easy enough: All she has to do is dial into a WAP portal and call
the messages up. Answering them is another matter. At a rate of six kronor
(65 U.S. cents or 70 euro cents) a minute, it's expensive to type messages,
especially given that they must be typed on a phone keyboard; to enter
certain letters, the user must push three buttons simultaneously.
"I usually just call people back," she says. "Sending messages from the
phone takes too long."
Out to Lunch
Another service -- dubbed "positioning" -- has proved even more
disappointing for some. The idea is to allow a mobile user to request a list
of restaurants or hotels close to where he's standing in a city. But when
Swedish sales manager Johan Brannmark recently tried the service in the
center of Stockholm, the results were disappointing. A Swedish yellow
pages for WAP phones -- a joint project between Sweden's traditional
yellow pages supplier, GulaSidorna, and Swedish phone company Telia
AB -- came up with several restaurant suggestions, but all were located
more than three blocks away. A second try gave Mr. Brannmark a listing
of more restaurants -- but three blocks in the other direction. All the while,
Mr. Brannmark was standing on a sidewalk smack dab in front of a trendy
eatery.
"It's close, but no cigar," says Mr. Brannmark, who has since given up his
WAP phone and reverted to a smaller Nokia model. "It may be cool --
when it actually works." (GulaSidorna officials say positioning will become
more precise as technology improves. They also acknowledge that the
order of restaurant listings depends on how much the establishments pay
for their Yellow Pages listings. "Those who pay us the most get listed first
on the WAP service," a spokesman says.) WAP games have been slow in
coming, too. Matthew Lewis, a 28-year-old financial analyst for Daiwa
SBCM Europe Ltd. in London, is so disappointed with the lack of WAP
entertainment in the U.K. that he has developed his own game for his 7110
Nokia WAP phone. Even when he's not using the phone, he pushes a
silver-colored button on the back to flip open the top, a la Keanu Reeves
in "The Matrix." Then he slams it shut on his chest. The trick is low-tech,
but satisfying. "It's a nice clunk when the top comes down," he says. "It's a
robust technology and perhaps the phone's best feature."
No News Is Bad News
Even some more basic, all-text information services have proven
disappointing. Just ask French business development manager Marc
Vogeleisen. He recently tried to pull down some news headlines on his new
Nokia 7110 WAP phone. But when he squeezed his thumb on the phone's
innovative scrolling button, the page wouldn't move. Disappointed, he tried
to establish another WAP connection -- to no avail. "It's embarrassing, "
Mr. Vogeleisen says. "This phone is expensive."
Things aren't any better in Germany, it seems. Last week, Deutsche
Telekom's T-Mobil unit reported that 250,000 of its 13 million subscribers
in Germany have purchased handsets capable of accessing WAP sites
since the service was launched in November. About 175,000 of them -- or
1.3% of T-Mobil's total mobile subscribers -- actually use the service,
generating 35,000 WAP sessions daily. T-Mobil says it is pleased with that
usage level, but things could be better. In Japan, wireless provider NTT
DoCoMo says that 4% of its subscribers are now using its
wireless-Internet service, i-mode.
In an odd way, frustrated WAP users are the lucky ones. At least they
have WAP phones. Most people don't. Shipments of WAP phones from
Nokia, Ericsson and Motorola have fallen behind schedule in the past year,
mostly because the manufacturers decided that the first batches of the
phones needed three months of additional testing to ensure they would
work on all existing GSM networks.
"In a dream world, you should be able to change systems overnight," says
Mats Lindof, Ericsson's vice president for strategy and technology
development in Lund, Sweden. "But that's not possible, not in the car
industry, not at Ericsson. That's been our headache right now. That's why
we're hearing lots of complaints from the market."
Falling Behind
The result: Manufacturers can't churn out enough phones to keep up with
strong demand from European wireless operators. Component shortages
have further delayed the release of popular models -- such as Ericsson's
R380 WAP-equipped smart phone -- by an additional three months or
more.
The handset shortage has delayed the introduction of WAP services, says
Phil Kendall, director of mobile-communications services at U.K. research
firm Strategy Analytics. "There aren't enough people out there developing
WAP services because there are not enough handsets," he says. "It is the
most appalling Catch-22 situation."
Even if you manage to purchase a WAP phone, getting it up and running is
hardly a snap. In Sweden, which likes to call itself "Wireless Valley," just
getting started may take a 20-some minute wait on a telephone help line.
After that comes an elaborate application process that involves creating up
to three passwords and entering four codes -- a hurdle that some Swedish
operators are trying to overcome by having consumers register for WAP
services and configure the phones via a traditional PC Web site.
The picture isn't much clearer at wireless operators. With per-minute rates
for voice phone calls falling, Europe's dominant phone companies know
they must make more money on data services to survive. But that
realization prompts more questions than answers. Operators are unsure of
how to bill such services and who should provide them. Some, like Sonera
Corp. of Finland, have opted to cooperate with independent service
providers and charge them a percentage for subscribers' data traffic.
Others, like Swedish phone giant Telia, have assumed the role of service
providers themselves. As a result, Telia's WAP services are limited and
prone to computer crashes. Telia customers suffer from long waiting times
when calling WAP help desks.
"We have not been able to deliver acceptable services," concedes Erik
Hallberg, the marketing director of Telia's wireless unit, Telia Mobile AB.
"Configuring WAP phones takes too much time. It needs to be more
automated." Nor have most European phone companies communicated
their WAP strategy and technical specifications to WAP service providers.
Many dot-WAP companies don't know whether their services will work
with certain operators, whether they will have access to WAP gateways,
or whether their products will be shunned because they compete with those
of certain operators. In Sweden, for example, Telia's gateway is closed to
customers of rival operators -- and the rivals reciprocate by refusing to let
Telia customers in.
User Backlash
All of this could spell trouble for the WAP standard, which has huge
industry backing from the likes of Nokia and Ericsson, Motorola and
Philips NV. "There has already been some user backlash," says Michele
Mackenzie, an analyst with research firm Ovum in London. "Operators
need to bring users' expectations in line with what they can offer." Europe's
mobile-phone industry doesn't have much time to get WAP right, Ovum
says, arguing that several technologies could be used as alternatives.
DoCoMo already is planning to introduce i-mode in Europe, and software
companies Microsoft Corp. and Logica PLC have launched
wireless-Internet products that don't require WAP.
Meantime, some service providers are finding ways to reach phone users
without going through the WAP gateways of big phone companies. Zaheed
Haque is the 28-year-old founder and CEO of Room33 AB, a Stockholm
startup that wants to become a leading wireless portal -- a WAP Yahoo!,
if you will. But his ambitions suffered an embarrassing setback at the
CeBIT technology trade fair in Hannover earlier this year. As he pitched
his wireless portal to a small crowd of potential customers and investors, it
proved impossible to dial into the Telia WAP gateway back in Sweden.
Instead, the phone spit back a disappointing message: "Connection failure."
After repeated tries, he gave up and invited interested customers to come
back later, when the network was up again. Few did.
"It's just another WAP flap," sighed Mr. Haque, a Bangladeshi engineer
who moved to Sweden four years ago lured by the promise of the wireless
Web. Undeterred, Mr. Haque soon hit on a way around the glitch:
Room33 now runs its own WAP gateway, allowing its customers to tap
directly into its messaging services and its version of an Internet browser.
"There are lots of services out there," he says. "But so far, no one can
reach them."
--David Pringle contributed to this article.
Write to Almar Latour at almar.latour@wsj.com |
