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Let the WAP games begin

By Charles Wright
September 7, 2004

Remember WAP - the so-called Wireless Access Protocol that was supposed to turn mobile phone handsets into portable information terminals?

Ostensibly aimed at duplicating on a tiny screen the same functionality that PC users obtained in their web browsers from those comparatively sprawling HTML pages, WAP was actually an attempt by network operators to contain their customers in a "walled garden" and feed them expensive titbits of data. Customers basically ignored WAP because the information wasn't particularly compelling, the access speed wasn't so much slow as painful and the costs were crippling.

Like most users, we eventually wrote off WAP as one of the most overhyped products in the history of technology. Then came this year's Olympic Games and we started wondering whether there might, after all, be a place for WAP.

Actually, a couple of things had happened before the Athens Games that changed the environment for WAP. The original protocol had been replaced by WAP2, which was a subset of HTML and therefore more open. GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) increased network speeds and - provided you used Optus, which has the best GPRS rates, or had some sort of plan with the other operators - the data wasn't quite so outrageously expensive. What the Olympics brought was interesting content.

A friend of ours who sells telephone systems and spends long days on the road equipped with a tablet PC and a Sony Ericsson T610 mobile phone was compelled to check the Olympics results. He found the cheapest and easiest way of doing that was with WAP, and we asked him to keep a daily diary.

The morning after swimmer Jodie Henry won her 100-metre freestyle gold medal, for instance, his first call was to Telstra's Olympics site. The well-designed service kept a running tally of Australia's results and gave quick access to the medal tally, reports, news and weather.

That was a 12 KB download, which at Optus' rates of 0.5 cents per KB (excluding GST) cost six cents. He got through another 12 KB reading two news stories about Australian athletes. The full day's events schedule ate up another 11.5 KB.

That wasn't quite enough sport for my friend. He checked the final score (4.5 KB) of the Port Adelaide-Collingwood AFL match, scanned the next round of AFL matches and checked the ladder (7.5 KB).

He then had a quick look at his email inbox and read one message (3 KB).

Planning his night's entertainment, he perused the programs for channels Seven, Nine and Ten, which was an 8.5 KB download. Under the Optus networker site, he also looked up the screening times for the science-fiction movie I, Robot (7 KB).

Checking on the Telstra share price was a 23 KB download to get to the Google WAP site and through that pick up the ASX listings.

Another 20 KB went on getting to Telstra's WAP link to ABC news. In both these cases, however, he would have saved a lot of that bandwidth by bookmarking the sites. From the bookmark, it took only 2 KB of data to get to the ASX listing and 2.5 KB to get to ABC news.

His entire traffic for the day amounted to 133 KB, or 67 cents. Using bookmarks, he could have cut the total to 80 KB, or 40 cents, with Optus. Compare that to the price of newspapers or telephone calls and it's hard to see any alternative that would be cheaper or quite as fast and direct as WAP. Which is something we never thought we would be able to say. That little screen on your GPRS phone could, after all, be a powerful portable information terminal.

Given something like the Treo 600, with its bigger screen and keyboard access, it's even more powerful. The email service we highly recommend as a replacement for your ISP email has just set up a WAP version and, on the Treo, it's a relatively cheap way of checking for an important email while you're on the road.
