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Mobile Phone Industry to Scrap WAP
joestump98 writes: "According to this story at Yahoo the industry has started an initiative to introduce "The Mobile Services Initiative (M-Series)" which aims to be an open software and hardware standard. The article goes so far to call WAP a "fiasco." The new M-Series is set to offer faster GPRS networks to offer consistent, high-quality mobile Internet."
Wireless is not just about low bandwidth - it's about highly variable bandwidth, high error rates, and latency sometimes measured in seconds.
Here are some of the things that TCP in particular has trouble with:
* Poor radio conditions lead to increased error correction (GPRS changes coding schemes on the fly) and re-transmissions (typically, 50% of all ethernet-sized packets are retransmitted because the basic medium is quite liable to corruption). Typical frame error rates are 1 to 2%, and errors tend to happen in bursts.
* Competition from voice calls or other data traffic in a cell, and lack of dedicated per-cell bandwidth (timeslots) for data traffic, lead to huge variations in bandwidth available.
The impact on TCP is that it frequently goes into slow start (because a whole series of packets is dropped by burst errors - TCP-Reno, the commonest implementation these days, is very sensitive to this). This means you go back to sending only one packet at a time (window size of one), then double the window size each ACK round-trip-time, until you get to half of your previous window size, when you start increasing linearly.
There is a lot of work going on to optimise TCP for wireless, following on from earlier work that optimised it for long fat pipes (e.g. SACK and window scaling). See http://www.aciri.org/floyd/tcp_small.html for a good survey. The key point is that wireless TCP performance has very little to do with TCP's behaviour on a link that has a constant 2400 bps bandwidth, a constant latency, and probably lower frame error rates.
It would have been better if the WAP people had just improved TCP, or created TCP gateways to the outside world, but plain unmodified TCP is not very usable in wireless. Apart from TCP, most of the WAP protocols could have been avoided, and certain WML was a mistake, but reduction of header overheads (IP, TCP and HTTP) and page sizes is important, so this would have had to be done on top of IP somehow. NTT DoCoMo's i-mode does prove that this is possible, though the technical details are not clear beyond their use of cHTML.
The real issue with WAP is terrible usability and poor implementations of browsers, WAP gateways, WAP servers and WML content - e.g. the Back button is dependent on the site coding it into WML, so sometimes you just can't go back, and frequently you get 'No gateway response' on trying a new site.
Also, it's very hard to report problems to WAP sites since they are not smart enough to include an SMS number where you could send them a report (and the problem could be anywhere between browser and site, in any case).
http://www.gsmworld.com/news/press_2001/press_rele ases_24.html
Firstly, M-Services (not M-Series, as mentioned in the submission) "could include enhanced graphics, music, video, games, ring tones, screen savers and other compelling services" (from the link). Note this is nothing to do with browsing content on the Internet.
Secondly, another quote from the article: "M-Services will leverage other key standardisation efforts like WAP, EMS, MMS and SyncML to bring a consistent user experience for digital content." says Jan Wäreby, CEO, Ericsson Consumer Division
To make an (admittedly poor) analogy, whilst WAP is like Web browsing, M-Services will be like Flash animation.
And anyway, the "failure" of WAP was clearly not due to poor download speeds, inability to use phones for browsing, or problems with using new protocols in mobile phone networks, as had already been claimed in this Slashdot thread. All of these factors are present in Japan, and despite this there is the success of NTT DoCoMo's iMode service, J-Phone's J-sky, or the TU-KA EZweb with in total 37 million users (See the stats at http://www.tca.or.jp/index-e.html)
Andrew Scott
I spent a lot of time playing with WAP. My company decided to support WAP mostly just because of all the hype around it, not because it was good technology. WAP sucked for a lot of reasons:
Given all that, I think the Internet will always be on phones in one form or another. Phones browsers will never be Internet Explorer, but phones now have sufficient CPUs and memory. Coming soon are beautiful color displays and bandwidth. With all of this, good ol' HTTP/TCP/IP will work fine as a protocol (Your mobile provider will pick Layer 2 for you). No need for a special protocol like WAP, instead Webmasters will key off of USER_AGENT and render differently for phones. Its that simple.
AllOutWap.com ranks the top sites.
Answer? Porn, Sports and (mobile phone) Ring-Tones..
Porn, although originally referring to writing about prostitutes, usually means images. I remember ASCII Art nudes in High School (early 80's): zit-stricken geeks hunched around a green-screen blurring their vision every-so-slightly to make out that picture of Victoria Principal. Real cool. I can (thank the Powers) only imagine how images look on Nokia 61xx Dark-Gray/Light-Gray screens.... If you're going to appeal to the Internet masses, you need to display full color motion pictures (well, you can cheat and optimize the display for flesh tones and rocking motions).
Although the marketing people understand the need to push porn (why else is it called W(h)AP and PALM PILOT?) the engineers are just figuring this out (evidently). How discouraging that your product has to appeal to the lowest common motivator to be accepted.
Why is it call High Tech, again?
--
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
- Graceful Degradation of Scalable Internet Services, from October 1999, calls WAP the Wrong Approach to Portability and generally trashes the idea that cell phones as we know them will ever be productive 'net access devices.
- In WAP Backlash, from July 2000, he says "skip the current generation of WAP" and trashes it some more. Plus he says "I told you so" a couple times.
- WAP Field Study Findings, December 2000; good quote: "Considering that WAP users pay for airtime by the minute, one of our users calculated that it would have been cheaper for her to buy a newspaper and throw away everything but the TV listings than to look up that evening's BBC programs on her WAP phone." Trashes WAP some more, says "I told you so" a couple more times (God, he loves saying that
;).
Anyway, good stuff if you want a user-centric view of why WAP tanked.question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
This was always a nonsense claim, since people were running IP over 2400 baud modems 10+ years ago, which is about as high latency, low bandwidth as you can get. IP protocol stacks typically have trouble keeping up with high bandwidth links such as fibre, not the low end.
The real reason was control: anything interoperable with the regular Internet would have been impossible to charge a premium for. This resulted in a separate WAP-Internet that didn't have the same level of content as the regular Internet. Users stayed away in droves.
Let's hope the new "wireless Internet" is based on existing standards this time, instead of something they made up out of thin air.