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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. 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