IP: Another view * 2 on WAP Backlash

[Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

> Date: Thu, 27 Jul 2000 09:22:04 +0300
> To: farber () cis upenn edu
> From: Petri Mahonen <petri.mahonen () vtt fi>
>
>
>
>
> Hi Dave,
>
> My comments on Alan's (and others) WAP discussion. Living in Finland, which
> is like Sweden more or less cellular laboratory of the world quite often, 
> gives you
> a perspective on WAP as it has been around from field trials up to 
> commercial use.
> I agree with Alan's comments on WAP -- but I think I am more WAP "hater" 
> than friend, partially because of my IP & datacomm background.
>
> The biggest problem with WAP is that marketing people have gone ballistic and
> are selling it like "wireless Internet" or "web on your pocket". We are 
> already
> experiencing some serious backslash from common users on this. Some of them
> have been expecting Internet. I would not care of this, but this backslash 
> is also
> affecting to serious academic R&D and product development done in companies.
>
> Moreover most of the WAP is very very poorly done. It is not only problem with
> small companies setting up unstandard WAP services, before learning to do WAP.
> It is worse. Quite many of terminal equipments and server products shipped 
> from
> manufacturers are broken. There has been instances where WAP phones from
> two well know Scandinavian manufacturers have not been compatible. Oh, make
> it worse, we have been able to see different behavior with same manufacturer's
> products.
>
> The slowness of WAP is, naturally, a problem. I have been telling in several
> conferences to people that it is something to be expected, it is more like
> SMS-with-menu (and steroids) than "wireless Internet dream". The biggest
> problem is that sometimes over 30% of connections are failed, but operator
> will nevertheless get you to pay for air time.
>
> The GPRS will make the connection establishment time going time, but
> you will not be seeing any substantial speed up for connections. Well,
> you might be getting 10 - 40 kilobits per second to your phone, but that's
> it. At least in Scandinavia, not a single operator is telling (publicly) how
> they are pricing GPRS service. It will not be too cheap, or network will
> be useless. Besides if it gets too cheap, I will start to run 
> VoIP-over-GPRS...
> why bother to pay for circuit switching prices. Well, you get a scenario,
> the very cheap GPRS prices will not materialize overnight, I think.
>
> Finally, there are two big problems with WAP. The main reasons I have
> been against it. First, there are well known problems in its security. Two
> biggest Nordic banks are already offering full WAP banking services
> over GSM. I have been waiting with some friends when the worse happens,
> hopefully never. From the user point of view, these banking applications
> are the best; carefully programmed, user interfaces has been though out etc.
> There should be more work on security before I would be trusting WAP too
> much.
>
> Second, the WAP philosophy has been "walled garden" and "lip service
> to IP". With walled garden I mean that most of the operators decided to give
> through their WAP gateways only their own (or partners') services. So forget
> free surfing like in Internet, you are in the typical closed telco world. 
> This is
> getting slowly better because of customer pressure. Finally, I could kind of
> live with writing new code for WAP, but they have gone and redefined almost
> every stack in the UDP/TCP/IP world available. So forget, IP compability
> and philosophy. Again this is all right as far as we remember that WAP
> is just SMS-with-menus and meant to be teleco system. But lets not
> fool ourselves it is not providing wireless Internet in technical sense.
>
> So in short, WAP is bad for Internet health because it is trying to
> enforce "walled garden telecom approach", is not really open standard
> but proprietary system that is not TCP/IP compatible, still unreliable,
> and some security questions are open. Other than that it is working
> just fine as a nice extension over SMS capabilities. Which one I have
> been using more?...SMS of course.
>
> The WAP will get better no doubt, and it will be good business. However,
> I would suppose that it will be transitional technology. In Scandinavia
> where mobile "things" are lasting very short time periods, it might be even
> a serious flop. As WLANs and 3G are getting more ubiquitous, it will be
> possible to get faster (with WLANs really fast, in case of 3G we are talking
> maybe about 40-100 kbit/s -- theoretical maximum 384 kbit/s during Phase I)
> and more standard compliant IP connections to new terminals. It is possible
> that within few years, WAP is fading away as a bad dream from our mind.
>
> Oh, and what is even worse hype than WAP...Bluetooth of course. But that
> is another story about marketing and "mediocre engineering" going ballistic.
>
> Petri
>
> =======
> Petri Mähönen
> Professor, Head of Department
> VTT, Wireless Internet Laboratory
> Kaitovayla 1, FIN-90570 Oulu, Finland
> e-mail: Petri.Mahonen () vtt fi
> web:    http://www.ele.vtt.fi/wil/