IP: WAP's up!

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

> From: Janos_Gereben <janos () netcom com>
> Subject: WAP's up!
> To: farber () central cis upenn edu
> Date: Fri, 28 Jul 2000 18:13:02 -0700 (PDT)
> X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.5 PL3]
>
> New shots fired in heated WAP debate
> Janos Gereben - the451.com
>
> San Francisco - Responding to reports published here Thursday about
> problems confronting development and marketing of the wireless application
> protocol, a prominent scientist told the451 that "within a few years, WAP
> may fade away like a bad dream."
>
> Petri Mahonen, director of the Wireless Internet Laboratory of the Finnish
> National Institute of Technology, primarily holds "marketing people"
> responsible. "They have gone ballistic, selling WAP as 'wireless Internet'
> or 'Web in your pocket,' which is creating a backlash effecting serious
> academic and industry research and development," he says.
>
> Mahonen, a research professor with the University of Oulu, is highly
> critical of WAP implementation in his own country (Finland is the leading
> user of wireless phones) and elsewhere, painting a picture of a confusing
> situation in which defective equipment and server products are shipped, WAP
> phones are incompatible, service is painfully slow and over 30% of WAP
> connections fail  while users are charged for airtime anyway.
>
> Alan Reiter, the subject of yesterday's interview that prompted Mahonen's
> statement, agrees with some of the criticism, but puts a different spin on
> the situation: "There's no doubt that manufacturers have had a difficult
> time developing bulletproof WAP products. They admit it, and they also
> admit problems with incompatibilities. Manufacturers and carriers all
> understand that incompatible equipment will destroy WAP's chances. But the
> early days of all technologies have problems. When cellular was first
> introduced in the US in the early 1980s, only a few manufacturers were able
> to develop what was then an extremely sophisticated handset."
>
> Mahonen says that development of global GPRS (general packet radio service)
> will make connections more reliable but won't improve connection speed
> substantially. "You might be getting 10-40 kilobits per second, but that's
> it," he says. There is also the question of price, with the possibility
> that GPRS will be costly, at least initially. (Mahonen sees an alternative
> for the technologically advanced user to run VoIP over GPRS.)
>
> Besides concerns about WAP security (shared by almost everybody in the
> field), Mahonen's basic objection to the protocol is that "its philosophy
> is 'walled garden,' while its champions pay lip service to IP." The wall,
> he says, has to do with the fact that most WAP operators restrict access to
> their own WAP gateways and those of their partners, "so forget free surfing
> like on the Internet  with WAP, you are in the typical closed telco world."
> WAP is not an open standard, he charges, but a proprietary system that is
> not TCP/IP-compatible, and "still unreliable" at that.
>
> Scott Goldman, CEO of the industry association WAP Forum, repeats Reiter's
> point about the technology presenting an "evolving situation," and says
> that Mahonen is "just plain wrong" in all his charges. But he accepts the
> 'walled garden' statement, pointing to the America Online paradigm. Just as
> AOL has achieved great success by providing a package of propriety
> capabilities for people who are not knowledgeable about technology, Goldman
> says, WAP offers a packaged, user-friendly service. In the future, however,
> "carriers can distinguish themselves" by providing alternatives, he adds.
>
> Regarding compatibility, WAP Forum claims that WAP will work with GSM-900,
> GSM-1800, GSM-1900, CDMA IS-95, TDMA IS-136, and 3G systems  IMT-2000,
> UMTS, W-CDMA and Wideband IS-95.
>
> For WAP security, Baltimore Technologies, Solomon Technology, and in
> Mahonen's own country, F-Secure and SSH among others, are reportedly close
> to releasing full-strength 128-bit encryption and authentication for WAP
> servers, with content security programs to follow. Goldman says Mahonen is
> "not in the real world" because high-profile companies are already using
> WAP for secure transactions.
>
> As far as writing new code for WAP, Mahonen says developers "have already
> gone and redefined almost every stack available in the UDP/TCP/IP world, so
> forget IP compatibility and philosophy." He repeats the charge that WAP is
> just an SMS (systems management server)-with-menus, and meant to be a telco
> system. "Let's not fool ourselves that it is providing wireless Internet in
> the technical sense." Goldman contradicts that: "SMS has nowhere the
> capabilities and resources you get from WAP. There is already a tremendous
> amount of content out there. Cellmania, for example, has come up with a
> list of 5,000 WAP sites."
>
> Even if WAP is improved and becomes successful, Mahonen sees it as
> "transitional technology," especially as WLANs and 3G become more
> ubiquitous. With that technology, speeds are expected in the 40-100Kbps
> range, with a theoretical maximum of 384Kbps, with more standard,
> IP-compliant connections to new terminals than WAP can provide, Mahonen
> says.
>
>
>
>
> --
> --------------------
> janos () netcom com, SF
> Attachments to janos.gereben () the451 com