Mobile Phone Industry to Scrap WAP

joestump98 writes: "According to this story at Yahoo the industry has started an initiative to introduce "The Mobile Services Initiative (M-Series)" which aims to be an open software and hardware standard. The article goes so far to call WAP a "fiasco." The new M-Series is set to offer faster GPRS networks to offer consistent, high-quality mobile Internet."

Re:WAP's not the problem; maybe not even WML

It's a result of free local calls for land-line connections. In the US, local calls are entirely free. As a result, the phone companies had no infrastructure to bill for local calls to mobile phones. As a result, in order for the mobile phone operators to make money, they had to bill the receiver rather than the caller.

This is the single biggest reason why mobile phone usage in the US is far lower than in Europe, as a percentage of the total market. In fact, mobile phone usage in the US is even lower than many developing nations. Of course, it's also the single biggest reason why Internet usage in the US is far higher than every other nation. Free local calls results in no incremental costs for Internet usage, which in turn leads to people surfing for pr0n for hours on end.

It may seem stupid when it comes to mobile phones, but it also has its strong points in other areas.

Wireless is more than low bandwidth

Wireless is not just about low bandwidth - it's about highly variable bandwidth, high error rates, and latency sometimes measured in seconds.

Here are some of the things that TCP in particular has trouble with:

* Poor radio conditions lead to increased error correction (GPRS changes coding schemes on the fly) and re-transmissions (typically, 50% of all ethernet-sized packets are retransmitted because the basic medium is quite liable to corruption). Typical frame error rates are 1 to 2%, and errors tend to happen in bursts.

* Competition from voice calls or other data traffic in a cell, and lack of dedicated per-cell bandwidth (timeslots) for data traffic, lead to huge variations in bandwidth available.

The impact on TCP is that it frequently goes into slow start (because a whole series of packets is dropped by burst errors - TCP-Reno, the commonest implementation these days, is very sensitive to this). This means you go back to sending only one packet at a time (window size of one), then double the window size each ACK round-trip-time, until you get to half of your previous window size, when you start increasing linearly.

There is a lot of work going on to optimise TCP for wireless, following on from earlier work that optimised it for long fat pipes (e.g. SACK and window scaling). See http://www.aciri.org/floyd/tcp_small.html for a good survey. The key point is that wireless TCP performance has very little to do with TCP's behaviour on a link that has a constant 2400 bps bandwidth, a constant latency, and probably lower frame error rates.

It would have been better if the WAP people had just improved TCP, or created TCP gateways to the outside world, but plain unmodified TCP is not very usable in wireless. Apart from TCP, most of the WAP protocols could have been avoided, and certain WML was a mistake, but reduction of header overheads (IP, TCP and HTTP) and page sizes is important, so this would have had to be done on top of IP somehow. NTT DoCoMo's i-mode does prove that this is possible, though the technical details are not clear beyond their use of cHTML.

The real issue with WAP is terrible usability and poor implementations of browsers, WAP gateways, WAP servers and WML content - e.g. the Back button is dependent on the site coding it into WML, so sometimes you just can't go back, and frequently you get 'No gateway response' on trying a new site.

Also, it's very hard to report problems to WAP sites since they are not smart enough to include an SMS number where you could send them a report (and the problem could be anywhere between browser and site, in any case).

This submission is completely misleading

This is not about scrapping WAP. See the original press release at

http://www.gsmworld.com/news/press_2001/press_rele ases_24.html [gsmworld.com]

Firstly, M-Services (not M-Series, as mentioned in the submission) "could include enhanced graphics, music, video, games, ring tones, screen savers and other compelling services" (from the link). Note this is nothing to do with browsing content on the Internet.

Secondly, another quote from the article: "M-Services will leverage other key standardisation efforts like WAP, EMS, MMS and SyncML to bring a consistent user experience for digital content." says Jan Wäreby, CEO, Ericsson Consumer Division

To make an (admittedly poor) analogy, whilst WAP is like Web browsing, M-Services will be like Flash animation.

And anyway, the "failure" of WAP was clearly not due to poor download speeds, inability to use phones for browsing, or problems with using new protocols in mobile phone networks, as had already been claimed in this Slashdot thread. All of these factors are present in Japan, and despite this there is the success of NTT DoCoMo's iMode service, J-Phone's J-sky, or the TU-KA EZweb with in total 37 million users (See the stats at http://www.tca.or.jp/index-e.html [tca.or.jp])

Andrew Scott

Not surprising

I spent a lot of time playing with WAP. My company decided to support WAP mostly just because of all the hype around it, not because it was good technology. WAP sucked for a lot of reasons:

• WAP was built to work around phones with low bandwidth, slow CPUs and low memory. The transfer protocol was compact, the markup language got compressed, etc. In the time it was taking for WAP to be accepted, all of these limitations (except bandwidth) have gone away.
• Security sucked. The spec. built-in a "man in the middle". WAP is dependent upon a WAP gateway which bridges the mobile network and the Internet. Because of this gateway, secure connections are not end to end. In addition, WML lets you define variables. Catch is that the variables are global to the phone and the spec. does not call for them to be concealed from other sites, so if another site knew the variable name I used for "password", they could steal my users' passwords.
• Fragmentation. Practically speaking, if you have one vendor's browser in your phone, your mobile provider must have that vendor's WAP gateway running in their network. On top of that, different browsers rendered things differently, making it a real pain to develop WAP content. Fragmentation is normal with an emerging market, but it never seemed to settle out with WAP.
• Phones don't really support packet data yet. Who wants to surf the net at $.10/min?
• Hard to use/small display. I think positioning WAP as the "wireless Internet" was foolish. I surf the net with at least a 14" monitor, 1024x768 resolution and a mouse. Anything less sucks.

Given all that, I think the Internet will always be on phones in one form or another. Phones browsers will never be Internet Explorer, but phones now have sufficient CPUs and memory. Coming soon are beautiful color displays and bandwidth. With all of this, good ol' HTTP/TCP/IP will work fine as a protocol (Your mobile provider will pick Layer 2 for you). No need for a special protocol like WAP, instead Webmasters will key off of USER_AGENT and render differently for phones. Its that simple.

Why WAP is better than the newspaper.

For everybody who thinks WAP sucks or is dead, then you haven't really seen what can be done on WAP. You've probably seen just the crappy shit that most mobile companies put out as WAP services. Want to see the future of WAP as a media platform?? Check out this WAP service:

http://wap.movingentertainment.com/hosted/flipmick /demo/ [movingentertainment.com]

Yep, comics anytime anywhere you want including archives for missed episodes. Let a newspaper and even a fixed Net try that! OH yeah, and you don't get black ink on the fingers when you read it!

Nielson Norman Group's WAP Usability Report

The Neilson Norman Group [nngroup.com] did a study of real users' experience with wap phones a while back.

Reading the summary, and having a lot of respect for what the authors had to say on other topics convinced me it wasn't worth my while to bother with WAP.

The WAP Usability Report [nngroup.com] (available in PDF form for $26) reports on a study where 20 people were given WAP enabled phones for a week and asked to report back on their experiences. The study was done in London because of the advanced state of WAP services there. Read the summary here [useit.com].

• 70% of users reported they would not use WAP within a year
• One user calculated it was cheaper to buy a newspaper and throw away everything but the TV listings rather than use WAP to check the BBC schedule

The summary says:

our basic conclusion is that WAP usability fails miserably; accomplishing even the simplest of tasks takes much too long to provide any user satisfaction. It simply should not take two minutes to find the current weather forecast or what will be showing on BBC1 at 8 p.m.

These are the same guys who test out concepts in web page design by sitting real users in front of browsers and watching them use the net. You may be familiar with some of the principles:

• Jakob Nielson [useit.com]
• Don Norman [jnd.org], author of The Design of Everyday Things [fatbrain.com], Things that Make Us Smart [fatbrain.com] and The Invisible Computer [fatbrain.com]
• Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini [asktog.com], one of the original designers of the Macintosh UI and author of Tog on Interface [asktog.com]. Check out Tog's Software Design Bookstore [asktog.com] to learn how to write software that doesn't suck. Read Top 10 Reasons the Apple Dock Sucks [asktog.com].

I strongly recommend anyone producing either content or software for the web regularly read Jakob Nielson's http://www.useit.com [useit.com], where you could have found out before you invested that neither WAP nor advertising on the Web work [useit.com].

I link these and a couple other useful sites in my brief section on Some Web Application Design Basics [sunsite.dk] in Use Validators and Load Generators to Test Your Web Applications [sunsite.dk]:

I'm not talking about pretty rollover buttons here, folks.

You need to understand that many web sites are developed with investments totalling many millions of dollars, only to have the effect of driving away any user who might have the misfortune to stumble across them, with much resulting heartbreak and the loss of fortunes.

Mike [goingware.com]

Re:WAP's not the problem; maybe not even WML

No, still don't see anything good about it. New Zealand has free local calls as well. All they need to key on is the first few numbers, same as any other route. Probably the stupidity again comes from a lack of standards used in the US. You guys don't all have GSM, I hear. That's useless.

Just about every standard there is was made as a proprietary system by Americans and then bettered by European standards bodies. Pity the US never seems to wait for the good stuff to come through. I'm sure *that's* a good reason WAP ain't doing so well, too:/

What's popular with WAP?

Is it business, news, stocks, weather? Local shopping?

AllOutWap.com [alloutwap.com] ranks the top sites [alloutwap.com].

Answer? Porn, Sports and (mobile phone) Ring-Tones..

Porn, although originally referring to writing about prostitutes, usually means images. I remember ASCII Art nudes in High School (early 80's): zit-stricken geeks hunched around a green-screen blurring their vision every-so-slightly to make out that picture of Victoria Principal. Real cool. I can (thank the Powers) only imagine how images look on Nokia 61xx Dark-Gray/Light-Gray screens.... If you're going to appeal to the Internet masses, you need to display full color motion pictures (well, you can cheat and optimize the display for flesh tones and rocking motions).

Although the marketing people understand the need to push porn (why else is it called W(h)AP and PALM PILOT?) the engineers are just figuring this out (evidently). How discouraging that your product has to appeal to the lowest common motivator to be accepted.

Why is it call High Tech, again?
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Check out Jakob Nielsen's WAP comments

Jakob Nielsen [useit.com], usability guru, had a couple articles on WAP:

• Graceful Degradation of Scalable Internet Services [useit.com], from October 1999, calls WAP the Wrong Approach to Portability and generally trashes the idea that cell phones as we know them will ever be productive 'net access devices.
• In WAP Backlash [useit.com], from July 2000, he says "skip the current generation of WAP" and trashes it some more. Plus he says "I told you so" a couple times.
• WAP Field Study Findings [useit.com], December 2000; good quote: "Considering that WAP users pay for airtime by the minute, one of our users calculated that it would have been cheaper for her to buy a newspaper and throw away everything but the TV listings than to look up that evening's BBC programs on her WAP phone." Trashes WAP some more, says "I told you so" a couple more times (God, he loves saying that ;).

Anyway, good stuff if you want a user-centric view of why WAP tanked.

question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes

WAP's not the problem; maybe not even WML

WAP isn't the real problem. If anything, it's that stripped down language WML. The only crimp WAP adds is that ridiculous per transfer byte limit, a bit under 1.5k, the compressed version that is. But the real problem is-- unsurprisingly-- the crusty hardware the stuff runs on. Unless this new standard insists on certain minimal UI... mostly, real keyboards or an acceptable substitute like graffiti... it's not going to be much better. And while we're dreaming, lets get a decent price structure where the cost of contacting me by cellphone is your expense, not mine, and text messages are cheaper than the bandwidth needed for talking.
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Let's hope they get it right this time

One of the reasons WAP was a disaster, IMHO, was because they invented a completely new set of protocols to do things that IP/UDP/TCP could already do. Presumably this was because high latency, low bandwidth wireless links couldn't handle regular Internet prototols.

This was always a nonsense claim, since people were running IP over 2400 baud modems 10+ years ago, which is about as high latency, low bandwidth as you can get. IP protocol stacks typically have trouble keeping up with high bandwidth links such as fibre, not the low end.

The real reason was control: anything interoperable with the regular Internet would have been impossible to charge a premium for. This resulted in a separate WAP-Internet that didn't have the same level of content as the regular Internet. Users stayed away in droves.

Let's hope the new "wireless Internet" is based on existing standards this time, instead of something they made up out of thin air.

Re:Why not just use HTML ?

Mainly because HTML is crap! The main problem with HTML is that it has such bad structure making it incredibly hard to parse. Whats more, companies like Microsoft have allowed people to get away with writing badly formed HTML so that a majority of the pages on the internet suffer from malformed HTML. Writing a HTML browser that strictly follows standards would cripple most web pages. WML gets around this problem by being XML based rather than SGML based. XML enforces much stricter rules on the structure of tags. For example, in XML tags have to be closed in the reverse order to which they were opened. Consequently, the parser is easier to write and a lot smaller. This is vital for phones and PDA that don't have hugh memory and processing powers. HTML is definitely not the way forward but is rather something we should consider dropping altogether.

Re:Let's hope they get it right this time

This is a vary good point. The telcos and hardware vendors' decision to use a non-interoperable protocol and access mechanism was extremely short sighted. I'm suprised they didn't learn from a half decade of web content delivery experience and three decades of IP based networking experience; about the tremendous of interoperability. It's truly increadible the architects of WAP and GPRS didn't get this right. Oh, well. Perhaps 3G will be better. It doesn't sound to me like the replacement of WAP with M-Services alone will do the trick. We'll see...

--CTH


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Re:Let's hope they get it right this time

This is soooo wrong... WAP doesn't run over TCP/IP or HTTP for that matter. There is a vital piece, called a WAP gateway, that provides the translation services between the HTTP protocol and the WAP protocols mentioned before. The phones don't understand TCP/IP or HTTP. All they do is talk the WAP equivalents with the gateway, that will, in turn, go out and get the HTTP content. Of course, this is one of the reasons why WAP sucks.

How can M-Services improve speed of GPRS

WAP was just an application layer above GPRS. If this M-Services is it's replacement for WAP, how can it 'offer faster GPRS'. GPRS is the transport layer.

It be kinda like saying that using gzip to compressed a file before transfering, is offering faster dial-up.

By the way, is GPRS deployed anywhere in the US?

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