The Renaissance of WAP
Tags : WAP, Mobile, WAP2.O, mobile ads, Killer technology, Mobile Market
It has been shown repeatedly that introducing new technologies takes a lot longer than first thought. All new products and technologies go through three stages of growth: an innovation phase, a growth phase and a maturity phase. It takes about the same time for a new technology or product to go from zero to 10% adoption (the innovation phase) as it does for it to go from 10% to 90% adoption (growth phase) and as it does from 90% to 100% (maturity phase). For instance, local area networking technology took almost 15 years to really reach the mass market. Indeed it might be reasonable to say that the PC, first seen around 1977 didn’t become a mainstream product until the early 1990s when they became fast enough and cheap enough with sufficient additional support that a mass market developed. Slow introduction is nothing new.
Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) was introduced with great expectations, widely touted as the next “killer technology” in the mobile industry. When it failed to create an impact in the market, it was dismissed with phrases such as “Worthless Application Protocol”, “Wait And Pay”, and so on. In recent years, however, the technology is experiencing a renaissance - largely driven by WAP sites offering customized phone ringtones, wallpapers and game content.
Why was WAP touted as the next killer technology?
First let’s try to understand why WAP’s initial failure caused such a heart-break. For a moment, let’s go back to the early 2000s…
Investors and business analysts were looking at the booming e-commerce sector, and taking into consideration the growing number of mobile phones. Somehow, they put two and two together and came out with an answer in the billions. Why? Well they had research reports saying that there would be 1 billion mobile phones in use very soon … and other research reports that said that mobile phone users replace their handsets anywhere between 9 months to every 2.5 years. So there it was: if you can have 1 billion phones in three years time and they are all internet-enabled then you can have 1 billion people surfing the internet and doing m-commerce with their phones. Even without transaction charges, you could probably charge 20 dollars a month as a subscription. Suddenly we’re talking about billions of dollars a month in revenue. Who wouldn’t be excited!
So what went wrong??!!
Public Perception
At the time of its introduction, leading users to expect WAP to have the performance of the Web was a major contributing factor for WAP’s initial failure. One telco’s advertising showed a cartoon WAP user “surfing” through a Neuromancer-like “information space”.
Let us also take a minute to think about what sparked the idea of WAP. As we all know, WAP was introduced for second generation (2G) mobile phones and networks then suffered from numerous limitations that made it impossible (or rather impractical) to use standard Internet protocols and technologies. The most visible of these limitations include the following:
- Low bandwidth (usually 9.6 kbps)
- High network latency
- Small, mostly monochrome displays
- Numeric keypads
- Slow processors
- Limited memory
The speed and performance of WAP on these early infrastructures were suitable for information services and not really for fun WAP surfing. The marketing buzz created around WAP created a false image of what consumers could expect from the technology.
Non-standard implementations
In the early WAP “standards”, there were many optional features and under-specified requirements, which meant that compliant devices would not necessarily interoperate properly. Different phone manufacturers had varying implementations of the same feature because of ambiguity in the specifications. As an example, some phone models would not accept a page more than 1 Kb in size; others would downright crash. B
