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/