The WAP forum predicts that as many as 525 million WAP enabled handsets will be sold in the United States and Europe by the year 2003. And that's not taking into account the world's biggest market - China. Or India, Indonesia, Mexico - think of any place in the world with a big population and limited landlines. Internet mobiles are the boom technology of tomorrow.
March 28, 2000
Around a third of a million new subscribers join the world's mobile phone services every day. They're not all looking for Internet access, and even those with suitable handsets might not bother to get connected, but research company Forrester reckons that by 2004, one third of all Europeans - over 200 million people - will regularly use Internet services on their mobile phones.
And what will they use them for?
Stock market alarms - your phone can tell you automatically when a key stock goes below a certain level. Travel and leisure - when you're stuck in a strange city, ask your phone what's on, where to eat, and get it to phone for a taxi to the restaurant after you've read the online review. Shopping - buy the week's groceries while you're stuck in traffic (though if you'd used the online weather and information services, you might not have got stuck in the first place).
When higher bandwidth G3 mobiles are introduced - and these are also due within a couple of years - your phone will be able to download streaming music. When you hear a track you like in a coffee shop, simply hold your mobile up in the air to listen. It will tell you what the track is and the latest scandal on the singer, then download a copy of the song from a Web server.
Don't scoff. Current technology could do all this right now, the main limitation is that we poor overworked humans haven't had the time to write the necessary lines of computer code. The possibilities are endless.
In Japan, the revolution is already happening. NTT DoCoMo (docomo is Japanese for "anywhere") is Japan's largest mobile phone operator and the first network in the world to allow subscribers continuous access to the Internet via mobile phones. Users can send email and visit a few thousand specially-formatted Web sites. Subscriber numbers are predicted to reach 20 million by the end of 2001. Already it's the biggest single ISP in the country, including all land-based providers.
It's happening in Europe too. At least half the big European ecommerce sites are currently adapting content to serve mobiles, and these should come on-stream this year. The BBC has public content formatted for mobile phones right now.
So far the mobile phone has been a simple device used to help people communicate. It's been hopeless when it comes to managing the information that makes our lives easier. But the next generation will be much closer to the ideal - a single smart gadget that allows people to check their e-mail, consult the Internet, plan their schedule and make phone calls. A mixture of an electronic organizer, a personal computer and a mobile phone.
Whether these gadgets of the future will still be called mobile phones is an open question. People in the industry talk about wireless devices, handsets, handhelds and appliances, because the word phone is too limiting. The wireless spectrum includes palmtops with aerials, phones with long screens on the back rather than small ones on the front, and car-based portables. Nokia believes that all new cars will be online by the end of 2005. Your next car might come with its own Internet address.
WAP
Central to all this wireless Internet activity is WAP (the Wireless Application Protocol) and the WAP Forum. Back in September 1997, Nokia, Ericsson, Motorola and Phone.com came together to establish an open standard for wireless Internet communications. More than 200 other companies have since joined, including Microsoft in May 1999 (only 18 months behind - not bad). The altruistic idea behind the forum is that a single protocol will speed progress and save tiresome battles between separate company standards.
It's an idea that worked well for the old GSM telephone protocol. The US got itself in a real mess with competing wireless standards from different companies, while Europe took on GSM as a general standard (so did China) and has raced ahead ever since.
US giant Motorola saw the light some time ago and moved most of its mobile development work to Europe. AOL recently formed a partnership with Nokia, and Ericsson to develop mobile services for its sites in Europe. It's the one Internet area where Europe is clearly in the lead.
Standards for the new G3 mobiles are also collaborative. These devices will be able to send and receive data at 2 megabits per second, once the relay stations have been updated. That's about the same receive rate as regular ADSL (and faster than ADSL on the transmission side). G3 should be available in Europe and Japan in around two years, and might dawdle into the US a year or two later.
WAP is now a technology approaching maturity. It has undergone a successful trial in Finland for almost a year. One of the initial tests involved lorry drivers on long haulage trips. Each lorry cab was fitted with a basic WAP enabled receiver, which relayed messages regarding speed, fuel consumption and time allocated on the tachometer. With the drivers' cooperation, companies found that by tracing and messaging they were able to influence where their drivers refueled, rested and ate - with resounding commercial success.
In theory, this could work as successfully on the average individual walking along a street. Their mobiles could influence which shops they went in, where they stopped to eat, and their route home. It's not surprising that many big companies want to get involved.
