"Japanese mobile phone company KDDI, created by the merger of telecommunications companies KDD, DDI and IDO, has seen the number of people signing up for its Wap service soar since it installed technology that made the whole system work much faster."
Thursday, 19 October, 2000, 14:21 GMT
Mobile web: Faster sells better
By BBC News Online internet reporter Mark Ward
When mobile web access speeds up, customers sign up.
Mobile phone companies in Japan have seen a sharp rise in the number of people using handsets with Wap browsers after the service got faster.
The news will be welcomed by European telecommunications companies struggling to get people using their preferred mobile net technology, the Wireless Application Protocol or Wap.
But experts say Wap still has big problems that may mean it will soon be superseded by other technologies.
Difficult navigation
Japanese mobile phone company KDDI, created by the merger of telecommunications companies KDD, DDI and IDO, has seen the number of people signing up for its Wap service soar since it installed technology that made the whole system work much faster.
No-one is making any money out of Wap
Simon Buckingham, Mobile Lifestreams
Wap is a technology that turns a mobile phone into a tiny web browser.
Although Wap phones have been on sale for months in Britain, take-up has been poor because navigating to a website with a handset is a tricky, time-consuming and unreliable process.
But the future of Wap in Europe may be brighter if the Japanese experience is any guide.
Packet push
Earlier this year, the mobile phone companies behind KDDI switched on a faster version of the technology they use to run their network that also made it much easier to access websites with Wap handsets.
Since then, subscriber numbers have soared. In January, there were less than one million people using it. Now there are almost four million.
The number of Europeans happy to use Wap may get a similar boost when operators adopt high-speed technologies. Many phone companies are close to rolling out a technology called General Packet Radio Service that boosts the speed of the wireless networks.
As its name implies, GPRS splits both conversations and data into small chunks, or packets, and sends them off across the network.
Wap and wane
This makes the service cheaper because people only pay for the data they receive rather than how long they have the connection open. It is also faster because it makes much better use of the available airspace.
Current mobile phone networks shuffle data around at a paltry 9.6 kilobits per second. By contrast GPRS has an upper speed limit of 171.2 kilobits per second.
Nigel Oakley, spokesman for Wap browser maker phone.com, said interest in Wap was growing fast but it would not just be speed that boosted its adoption.
"Speed is relevant, but services have to be compelling too," he said.
Wap survival
As likely to drive people to use Wap are useful and easy to use sites and phones, such as the Ericsson R380, that work better with Wap, he said.
But other analysts were more sceptical about the chances of Wap's survival.
"The problems with Wap do not lie in the technology," said Simon Buckingham, managing director of telecommunications company Mobile Lifestreams.
"The problems lie in the economics and the fact that no-one is making any money out of Wap."
Mr Buckingham said that mobile phone networks were losing money by subsidising Wap phones to boost subscriber numbers. The people making Wap sites cannot charge for what they do and some have to pay to be part of some Wap portals.
Next generation
Also, site makers only get back a tiny portion of the money the networks charge for accessing Wap services.
By contrast, said Mr Buckingham, NTT's I-Mode is hugely popular and successful because those offering services via the network get the majority of the cash generated by it.
NTT DoCoMo takes less than 10% of the end user price for services running across I-Mode. European mobile firms take as much as 75% of the money generated by Wap services for themselves.
Many companies are now looking at an alternative to Wap, known by the rather cumbersome name of Mobile Station Application Execution Environment (MexE), he said.
The technology is designed for use on next generation smart phones but many think it will do a far better job of supporting wireless information services. |
