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Some WAP History

Some WAP History. IAB Wireless Workshop Jerry Lahti, Nokia. The Starting Point. In 1996 mobile phone vendors rushing to sell wireless information Nokia had Smart Messaging for GSM SMS Unwired Planet had HDML+HDTP Ericsson had ITAP (at least in the lab) Carriers had a split personality

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Some WAP History

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  1. Some WAP History IAB Wireless WorkshopJerry Lahti, Nokia

  2. The Starting Point • In 1996 mobile phone vendors rushing to sell wireless information • Nokia had Smart Messaging for GSM SMS • Unwired Planet had HDML+HDTP • Ericsson had ITAP (at least in the lab) • Carriers had a split personality • desperate to find added value services • bring in more money • increase customer loyalty • ultraconservative • very concerned about use of bandwidth and network resources • concerned about investment cost • Internet alien and even scary thing • you still have to deal with carriers to create the wireless internet • Terminal technology quite constrained • low cost critical especially in the US market • available spare processing and battery power rather marginal

  3. Why a Common New Specification? • The proprietary solutions had limited success in some areas, but • being tied to a single vendor unacceptable to carriers and users • user base not large enough to attract 3rd party content and services • A common specification looked like the solution • the situation resembled quite a bit the BlueTooth one… • What would be the common ground? • use of an existing proprietary solution unacceptable to competitors • none of them addressed the sum total of the use cases, anyway • true Internet appeared infeasible • some research was saying that TCP was bad for the envisioned major application • some carriers simply did not want to go IP at that point • terminal people could not do the features using the standard Internet protocols • So it seemed necessary to create something new

  4. Goals in Design of WAP • Force a single new box upon carriers => WAP gateway • minimal initial investment • minimal disruption to existing network infrastructure • Do not force all the protocol stacks on the Internet to change • Do not force IP on carriers at that point in time (1997) • WDP & WTP • Keep IP as an option • escape hatch to the future • Make sure carriers are willing to run it on existing networks • incredible paranoia about protocol overhead • Provide security compatible with limited devices • Make the content to work on one-handed devices • Integrate telephony functions

  5. What Went Wrong - IMHO • Of course assuming that there is something right in WAP :-) • The content language did not map one-to-one to HTML • would have made life in some ways rather simpler • would have been compatible with the proprietary Nokia solution • WML has its advantages, though • The layering proposed by Nokia was not preserved • WDP-WTP-WTLS-WSP instead of WDP-WTLS-WTP-WSP as it is now • would have been rather more aligned with Internet stacks • Too many ports • something of a personal peeve

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