Does WAP Have a Future?

We've taken a look at the prospects for WAP now and in the immediate future, but it doesn't exist in a vacuum. WAP has competitors in the same space - do any of these carry a realistic threat of rendering WAP redundant?

NTT DoCoMo: I-Mode

I-mode is a hugely successful mobile Internet service in Japan. Figures released by the country's three cell phone operators recently showed that the number of Japanese mobile phone users with Internet access exceeded 10 million by the end of May (about 18% of all mobile phones in Japan), making the mobile phone Japan's most popular way of accessing the Web.

NTT DoCoMo has over 7 million subscribers, and the number is increasing by 20,000 a day. I-mode is now Japan's biggest Internet access platform. Incredibly, the popularity of the service forced DoCoMo temporarily to cap i-mode subscriptions, because of capacity problems created by the surge in subscriber numbers.

One reason for i-mode's popularity is that development is quite easy. As with WAP, sites have to be specially produced, but only a few extra HTML tags need to be learned in order to produce the CHTML (Compact HTML) content. No WAP gateway is required, so the infrastructure is simpler.

It also gives good support to retailers, as services purchased over i-mode are billed directly to the subscribers phone bill.

A WAP Competitor?

Certainly. Although NTT DoCoMo views it as a transitory technology, it's definitely an alternative to WAP, and NTT is making efforts to export the technology. It has already signed a deal with Hutchinson Whampoa in Hong Kong, and there's a possibility that i-mode will find a market here in Europe. This prospect is a very real threat to WAP since NTT DoCoMo formed an alliance with Netherlands GSM operator KPN, investing 5 billion euros and establishing a bridgehead for i-mode. Logica has just announced the first i-mode portal in the UK.

Conversely, however, i-mode itself is experiencing significant competition from WAP in Japan, as NTT's three main rivals have teamed up together to build a common WAP platform (the PacketOne system), running at 64 kbit/s over CDMA networks. Their EZWeb and Ezaccess services, which were launched in April 1999, had garnered more than a million subscribers by May 2000, based on about 210 (and growing) WAP-profiled sites.

I-mode is itself a less-robust protocol than WAP. It does not function well with packet networks and is technically weaker than WAP.

In the longer term, NTT DoCoMo is just as committed to convergence as the WAP Forum, and once this is achieved I believe that i-mode and WML will achieve equal status as XHTML applications (see below).