Openwave lands 20th gateway customer

Wireless software developer Openwave announced it has sold its next generation mobile access gateway to Canadian carrier Bell Mobility, making it the 20th carrier to implement Openwave’s enhanced wireless data solution.

The gateway, called MAG 6, incorporates wireless application protocol (WAP) 2.0 into its architecture, supporting the latest generation of wireless data applications, including MMS, xHTML browsing, multimedia and enhanced gaming. The gateway also supports multiple levels of billing, allowing carriers to not only charge by the packet, but also charge for different packets at different rates. Carriers could charge more for MMS communications, for instance, than they might for streaming video or audio.

“WAP 2.0 is moving the wireless Internet much closer to adopting the technologies of the desktop Internet,” said Fredrick Skantze.

While many carriers are still using first generation WAP gateways to distribute content over their mobile networks, most notably MMS picture messaging applications, WAP 2.0 portals are supporting the next-generation of enhanced mobile browsing using xHTML. Its predecessor WML supported only simple text, but xHTML allows for much richer content, emulating more closely the standard web pages, Skantze said.

“There is still very little xHTML content out there, but we’ll start to see a huge increase in xHTML pages in the next few months,” Skantze said. “We’re just starting to reach a critical mass of handsets that support the mark-up language.”