Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: How to start WAPping

Author:Andrew Herron
Posted:12/19/1999; 6:55:11 PM
Topic:How to start WAPping
Msg #:13738 (In response to 13733)
Prev/Next:13737 / 13739

Hi all,

The mobile phone that Dave craves is available in Japan now...they have signed up about 4 million customers in the last 10 month's - it's called an i-Mode mobile phone and it available from DoCoMo. It's totally proprietary, packet based (64K connection today I believe) but no one else in the world supports it.

For the time being WAP is the way things will go - everywhere else. No real doubt about that - there just is to much momentum behind it now. This is possibly difficult to see from the US - but it is happening.

WAP is really quite simple. Today you make a dial up connection from the mobile phone (via it's internal modem) to an ISP. Your WAP requests are routed via WAP Gateway which acts like a proxy server by handling WAP content requests and converting these to HTTP requests. The HTTP requests are then handled by a standard Web server (Frontier, Apache etc etc). The WAP Gateway then receives the response from the Web server and if it has the correct header it then encodes the response into a WAP byte stream for efficient transmission back across the wireless network to the mobile phone where it is parsed and displayed on the phones display.

I know that it is difficult to understand how big this opportunity will be from afar. Last October across Europe as a whole well over 2 billion SMS text messages were transported by mobile networks - by January this is confidently predicted to grow to just under 3 billion SMS messages. SMS is a crude but ubiquitous messaging technology in the GSM world - but it shows that there is an amazing pent up demand for mobile access to information. WAP is where that existing SMS market is going next - because as with SMS WAP will be in essentially every GSM mobile phone on the market by late next year. In many markets in Europe mobile phone penetration is already well above 50% across the board - Finland for example - the UK will reach 50% penetration during the 2nd quarter of Y2K. The mobile phone is so much part of peoples lives now here in Europe that it is fast becoming top consumer product.

It is impossible to over emphasise the opportunity for Frontier in the WAP space...

Andrew

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