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. …
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.
... 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."
No News Is Bad News
…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.
…"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.
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." ….
Write to Almar Latour at almar.latour@wsj.com
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This is an edited version of the WSJI article. Sounds pretty bad right now.
Jim |
