Comment Articles

The bad rap against WAP

Charles Cooper AnchorDesk

Published: 06 Oct 2000 17:48 BST

Since July, he has attended some 20 conferences around the country, in the process sitting down for close to 100 interviews with reporters. The pitch remains the same wherever he goes: Despite bumps in the road, WAP is still the future of the wireless Internet.

That's not altogether surprising considering Goldman's role as chief executive of the WAP Forum. But it's become an increasingly tough sell. Over the last half year, the excitement over WAP, a specification governing the way wireless devices connect with different services, has been replaced by criticism that it's a flash-in-the-pan technology that has outlived its 15 minutes of fame.

I caught up on Thursday with Goldman -- where else but at a conference -- who was just about to fend off more arrows during a panel discussion on wireless technologies.

But I think Goldman and the WAP Forum have had to deal with a bum rap.

If Goldman had a nickel for every time somebody said we're entering the age of wireless data, he'd be fat and happy in a Malibu mansion. Yet the fact is that with about 400 million enabled devices in the world, WAP access to the Internet for enterprise and personal content is a reality.

The big mistake made by proponents was to promote the idea that the experience of using WAP-enabled devices would be just like accessing web pages on a garden-variety desktop PC. Seems that some of the advertising agencies took liberties whetting the public's appetite. Hence the (false) expectation that you could surf a web site using a WAP device with the same level of quality and the same speed as a desktop.