Mobile Internet “WAP”

There is considerable interest in small portable devices capable of accessing the Web via a wireless link. Once the Internet and mobile phones had become commonplace, it did not take long before somebody got the idea to combine them into a mobile phone with a built-in screen for wireless access to e-mail and the Web. The "somebody" in this case was a consortium initially led by Nokia, Ericsson, Motorola, and phone.com (formerly Unwired Planet) and now boasting hundreds of members. The system is called WAP (Wireless Application Protocol).

A WAP device may be an enhanced mobile phone, PDA, or notebook computer without any voice capability. The specification allows all of them and more. The basic idea is to use the existing digital wireless infrastructure. Users can literally call up a WAP gateway over the wireless link and send Web page requests to it. The gateway then checks its cache for the page requested. If present, it sends it; if absent, it fetches it over the wired Internet. In essence, this means that WAP 1.0 is circuit-switched system with a fairly high per-minute connect charge. To make a long story short, people did not like accessing the Internet on a tiny screen and paying by the minute, so WAP was something of a flop (although there were other problems as well). However, WAP and its competitor, i-mode appears to be converging on a similar technology, so WAP 2.0 may yet be a big success. Anyways, WAP 1.0 was the first attempt at wireless Internet.