Download 4. What went wrong with WAP

CASE WAP: REASONS FOR FAILURE
Juha Palomäki
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Helsinki University of Technology
[email protected]
Abstract
This paper investigates the reasons that led to the failure
of Wireless Application Protocol during its first years.
WAP is compared to its highly successful Japanese
counterpart i-mode and finally some ideas on what
might have changed the fate of WAP are given.
Key Words
Wireless Application Protocol, WAP, Mobile Internet,
i-mode
1. Introduction
During the last years of the 20th century great
expectations were loaded on the Wireless Application
Protocol. Many companies were hoping to make good
money by bringing the wireless internet to the pocket of
every mobile phone user. At the same time in Japan
NTT DoCoMo was rethinking its mobile strategy. The
market for voice services was becoming saturated and
something new had to be found to guarantee the steady
growth.
Unfortunately things did not go as planned with WAP.
Soon after first phone models appeared on the market,
the public opinion labeled WAP as failure. All aspects
from usability to pricing were criticized. Some promises
were made about how things would change with the
introduction of packet based bearers (GPRS), but the
damage was already done. At the same time, on the
other side of the world i-mode became a huge success
with thousands of active users and hundreds of content
providers. Two systems, developed to solve almost
same problem. Other one is huge success, other a giant
failure. What went wrong with WAP?
The paper is divided into three sections. First I
introduce both WAP and i-mode. Then I review some
issues about WAP that have been raised in various
sources and provide some comparisons to i-mode.
Finally I provide my own view on what changes could
have changed the fate of WAP.
2. Wireless Application Protocol (WAP)
WAP Forum was founded in 1997 by Nokia, Ericsson,
Motorola and Unwired Planet1 to provide a single
global standard for wireless data access for all handheld
mobile devices. Before WAP Forum all three
1
In 1999 Unwired changed its names to Phone.com. In late 2000
Phone.com merged with Software.com to become Openwave.
companies were working on their own technologies.
Unwired Planet had the Handheld Device Transport
Protocol (HDTP), Nokia had introduced the Smart
Messaging concept and Ericsson was working on
Intelligent Terminal Transfer Protocol (ITTP). The
technology from Unwired Planet was probably the most
advanced, since their aim was to bring Internet access to
mobile phones. It was fairly easy for them to reach an
agreement with Ericsson which immediately saw the
potential of an open standard. Nokia, however, needed
more convincing and delayed its decision until last
minutes. It officially joined the group just before WAP
Forum was announced. In 2002 Open Mobile Alliance
was formed and WAP Forum – among other similar
organizations – was consolidated to it. (OMA 2004,
Sigurdson 2001)
WAP Forum quickly gained popularity among
companies. The members included carriers, handset and
network equipment manufacturers, software vendors
and content providers. In 1999 the manufacturer
member companies represented 90 percent of the global
handset shipments and carrier members had over 100
million total subscribers. (Khare 1999)
The first set of WAP specifications (WAP 1.0) were
released on 1998 and next major upgrade (WAP 2.0) in
2002.
In the technical sense WAP has become a great success.
Almost all new mobile phones on the market support at
least some of the WAP specifications. According to
statistics collected by Mobile Data Association
(http://www.text.it/wap) there were on average 38
million daily WAP page views during January 2004 in
UK, showing a significant increase from the number of
17 million a year before.
2.1. Technical overview
WAP was developed with following considerations on
mind:
- Limitations of cellular phones: limited
processing power, limited battery life and very
limited memory
- Limitations of cellular networks: low
bandwidth, high latencies and unreliable links
The WAP protocol stack can be considered independent
from the bearer services, only a small adaptation layer is
needed. Adaptation layers allowed over short message
service (SMS), Unstructured Supplementary Services
Data (USSD), Circuit Switched Data (CSD) and many
other technologies. (GSM Association 2004)
In WAP the mobile terminal communicates with a
WAP gateway using WAP protocols. The WAP
gateway then uses HTTP(S) to talk with the content
provider. The content can be hosted on a standard web
server. The WAP gateway is usually run by the operator
but in some special cases the content provider or
enterprise may decide to use its own gateway.
Figure 1 WAP protocol stack
WAE
WAE
WSP
WSP
HTTP
HTTP
WTP
WTP
TCP
TCP
WDP
WDP
IP
IP
L2
L2
L1
L1
Mobile
Terminal
Mobile
Network
Wireless
WAE
WML
WSP
WTP
WDP
WAE
WAP
Gateway
Operator
network
unofficial sites are only available if user knows the
address. Only official sites can bill the customer
through DoCoMo. [5]
DoCoMo carries the telecommunications traffic
charging the customers a monthly fee as well as based
on the amount of bits transferred. It also collects the
payments for the value added services provided by the
content providers. The content providers then pay a
commission to DoCoMo which is usually less than
10%. The pricing of the content is based on flat-rates.
Users pay from 0,78€ to 2,34€ per month for each site
they “subscribe”. [3,5]
In mid 2002 the average revenue per user for i-mode
was 8130 yen (70 euros), with data services generating
1630 yen (14 euros). [4]
Figure 2 I-mode ecosystem (Vincent 2001)
Content
Provider
content provider
Internet
Wireless Application Environment; WML
and WMLScript
Wireless Markup Language
Wireless Session Protocol
Wireless Transaction Protocol
Wireless Datagram Protocol
information
information
charges
commission
fee
DoCoMo
subscriber
- monthly charges
- packet transmission
- information charges
3. I-mode
NTT
DoCoMo
is
Japan’s
largest
mobile
communications operator. In 1997 it seemed that the
market for mobile voice services in Japan would
become saturated in near future. To continue rapid
growth, NTT DoCoMo set its sight to mobile data
market. As the result, i-mode was born. Practically all
aspects of i-mode are controlled by DoCoMo, including
the handset specifications, interface and branding. Even
though the handsets are manufactured by different
companies they are sold under the DoCoMo brand.
(Kodama 2003, Huisken 2001)
3.2. Technical overview
I-mode runs over packet switched mobile network. The
network is based on NTT’s proprietary PDC-P packet
technology with maximum transmission speed of
9.6kbit/s [12].
The i-mode sites are constructed using C-HTML, which
is a compatible subset of HTML. The content providers
do not need any special equipment or software to
provide
the services
forprotocol
i-mode.[4,6]
Figure
3 I-mode
stack (NTT 2000)
3.1. Business strategy
In traditional telecom business model there are two
main players: the operator and subscribers. I-mode adds
a third player to the model, the content provider.
Usually in these kinds of scenarios the operator would
be the dominant player. However in i-mode the
relationship between the operator (DoCoMo) and
content provider is based on equality and they are both
sharing the risks and profits. (Kodama 2003, Vincent
2001)
The i-mode sites can be divided into two groups:
official and unofficial sites. Users can navigate to the
official sites through the i-mode menu system, while
HTML
HTML
HTTP
HTTP
TL
PDC-P
TL
PDCP
Mobile
Terminal
Wireless
TCP
TCP
TCP
TCP
IP
IP
IP
IP
L2
L2
L2
L1
L1
L1
Gateway
Content
Provider
Mobile
Network
Operator
network
Internet
4. What went wrong with WAP
4.1. User experience
One of the most criticized aspects of WAP was the
usability. According to a field study conducted in late
2000 by Nielsen Norman Group 70% of the people
surveyed decided not to continue using WAP after the
study that lasted for a week. As they say it “Our basic
conclusion is that WAP usability fails miserably;
accomplishing even the simplest task takes much too
long to provide any user satisfactions. It simply should
not take two minutes to find the current weather
forecast of what will be shown on BBC1 at 8 p.m.”
(Nielsen 2000) On the other hand another study
concluded that with careful design it is possible to
develop effective focused services with WAP
(Buchanan 2001). These mixed results suggest that the
usability problems could have been caused mainly by
uninformed developers.
Interoperability among WAP capable devices was an
important issue for WAP Forum and their activities did
extend to the user interface layer as well. However, the
standards did not define exactly how different user
interface elements should be displayed on screen and
vendors ended up implementing basic structures in very
different ways. This made the life of developers even
more difficult. (Kumar 2003)
Another study conducted among Finnish elementary
school students showed that the usability problems were
not only caused by bad service design. The study was
done using one of the first WAP phones, Nokia 7110.
The students had trouble using the phone for surfing
even though they had been given lessons on the subject.
(Kiili 2002)
Many articles also claim that people did not want to use
WAP because of the long startup delay caused by
circuit switched connections. (Vincent 2001, Kumar
2003)
On the i-mode side DoCoMo had the full control on
how the terminals were designed. The devices had onetouch access to the i-mode service and official content
providers had to conform to DoCoMo’s quality criteria
and approval. This of course gave them a chance to
guarantee a pleasant user experience. (Huisken 2001)
4.2. Security
Wireless Transport Layer Security – WTLS – was
incorporated in the WAP specifications on early phases.
The problem with WTLS however was that it only
covered the connection from mobile terminal to the
WAP gateway. The WAP gateway could then use
encrypted HTTP to communicate with the content
provider. This meant that all network traffic was
encrypted, but there was no end-to-end security.
(Ashley 2001)
This was a problem for especially security conscious
content providers like banks. At least some of them
solved the problem by setting up their own modem
pools and WAP gateways. This was not an easy
solution for the end user, since he had to configure the
new phone numbers and other settings to his mobile
phone. With this configuration the user could no longer
“surf” freely from site to another, instead he had to
deliberately break the connection when changing site.
(Ashley 2001)
The first versions of i-mode also shared the problem,
since it did not adopt the SSL for encrypting HTTP
communications until March 2001. (Ashley 2001)
4.3. Revenue sharing
Obviously one reason for i-mode’s success is the
relationship between content providers and the
operators. User and content provider friendly pricing
structure has helped to increase the amount of content
providers. This created a positive feedback loop; more
content providers attracted more users, more users
attracted even more content providers.
The WAP on the other hand was criticized for the
exactly same reasons i-mode was thought to be
successful. The operators wanted to be gatekeepers to
the wireless Internet, collecting hefty taxes from
whoever wanted to pass. Some operators even
prevented their customers from using other WAP
services than the operator’s own portal. This pretty
much made it impossible for other companies the offer
even free WAP content on their web sites, unless they
wanted to setup their own model pool and WAP
gateway.
Since the operators did not provide any efficient
mechanism for fair revenue sharing, it was very difficult
for the content providers to find a viable business
model. (Kumar 2003)
4.4. Pricing
The i-mode’s pay-per-packet pricing model was more
attractive for users than the pay-per-time model used
with WAP. Pay-per-time meant that users wanted to
minimize the amount of time spent browsing WAP
content. Charging per minutes was natural choice, since
on the network point of view the WAP connection did
not differ in any ways from an ordinary data call.
4.5. Marketing
In the middle of dot-com era many companies had to
over hype the possibilities of wireless systems in near
future in order to attract venture capital. The future
users got their share of the hype as well. Expectation
management failed and people started to think that the
promised mobile Internet shall be the Internet made
mobile. This should have not happened, since most of
the parties were well aware of the technical limitations
that could not be overcome in short term. When users
did not get what they expected, they were disappointed
with the technology. (AberdeenGroup 2000)
Mobile Phone manufacturers seemed to have trouble
bringing WAP capable phones to market, prompting
press to ask whether WAP actually stands for “Were
Are the Phones?”. The launch of WAP services and
phones should have happened simultaneously, but
because of the delays, there was a period when
everybody was just waiting for the first terminals to
appear. (AberdeenGroup 2000)
MobileInfo.com Points out the differences between the
marketing of i-mode and WAP. While i-mode was
targeted to a broad demographic, the WAP was aimed at
business users. On the service side the i-mode
marketing concentrated on explaining people what they
could do with i-mode, while WAP marketing misled
people by posing WAP as the Wireless Internet.
(MobileInfo)
5. Conclusions
Many things went wrong with wireless application
protocol. In my opinion the most important issues that
might have changed its fate are:
1) Operators should have co-operated with content
providers, providing them billing services and
collecting only reasonable transaction fee.
2) The WAP specifications should have been stricter
on issues that caused problems for developers.
3) More emphasis should have been placed on the
usability of the first WAP services to prevent users
from getting negative first impression.
4) Cheaper or even free connection plans should have
been offered to allow users to explore the new
services.
6. References
OMA Web-site, About Open Mobile Alliance.
http://www.openmobilealliance.org/about_OMA/index.
html (Referenced 20 April 2004)
Mitsuru Kodama, Strategic community-based theory of
firms: case study of NTT DoCoMo, The Journal of
High Technology Management Research, Volume 14,
Issue 2, Autumn 2003
Vincent, G., Learning from i-mode, IEE Review,
Volume: 47 , Issue: 6 , Nov. 2001
Kenichi Ishii, Internet use via mobile phone in Japan,
Telecommunications Policy, Volume 28, Issue 1,
February 2004
Sando Grech, i-mode pricing, http://www.netlab.hut.fi/
opetus/s38042/k03/topics/i-modepricing.pdf
(Referenced 20 April 2004)
Enoki K., i-mode: the mobile Internet service of the
21st century, Solid-State Circuits Conference, 2001.
Digest of Technical Papers. ISSCC. 2001
IEEE International , 5-7 Feb. 2001
Ashley, P.; Hinton, H.; Vandenwauver, M.,Wired
versus wireless security: the Internet, WAP and iMode
for E-commerce, Computer Security Applications
Conference, 2001. ACSAC 2001. Proceedings 17th
Annual
Nielsen J., Ramsay M., WAP Field Study Findings,
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20001210.html,
referenced 16 April 2004
Kiili, K., Evaluating WAP usability: “What usability?”,
Wireless and Mobile Technologies in Education, 2002.
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Aug. 2002
Kumar, V., Parimi, S., Agrawal, D.P., WAP: present
and future, Pervasive Computing, IEEE, Volume: 2 ,
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Khare, R., W* effect considered harmful, Internet
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1999
Sigurdson, J., WAP OFF - Origin, Failure and Future,
http://www.telecomvisions.com/articles/pdf/wap-off.pdf
(Referenced 18 April 2004)
GSM Association, What is WAP?
http://www.gsmworld.com/technology/wap/intro.shtml
(Referenced 22 April 2004)
NTT Mobile Communications Network Inc.,
DoCoMo’s i-mode Toward Mobile Multimedia in 3G,
IETF 47 plenary session
http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/00mar/slides/plenaryimode-00mar/sld001.htm (Referenced 15 April 2004)
MobileInfo, Business Approach: NTT DoCoMo vs.
European and American Telecoms
http://www.mobileinfo.com/imode/buz_approach.htm
(Referenced 20 April 2004)
Huisken, Neide, Prado, The Wireless Economy, An
independent Analysis of the Competitive Forces,
Revenue Models and Wireless Advertising Possibilities,
2001,
http://www.imapproject.org/imapproject/downloadroot/
public3/wireless-study.pdf (Referenced (22 April 2004)
G. Buchanan, S. Farrant, M. Jones, H. Thimbleby, G.
Marsden, M. Pazzani, Improving mobile internet
usability, April 2001, Proceedings of the tenth
international conference on World Wide Web
AberdeenGroup, Cutting EDGE: The 3G alternative, An
Executive White Paper, 2000,
http://www.aberdeen.com/cec/eurowiress.pdf,
(Referenced 21 April 2004)