Gateway to the Wireless Internet

WAP gateways put wireless networks in contact with the Web and lay the groundwork for killer applications of today and tomorrow.

North American service providers — with the exception of AT&T Wireless, Sprint PCS and Verizon Wireless — have been slow to deploy even pre-WAP systems providing wireless access to the Web and Internet. Looking to Asia and Europe as models, it’s clear that WAP, or some version of it, soon will become popular in the United States, too. Preparing your network for that eventuality means choosing network components such as a WAP gateway, the connection between your network and the Internet. With a number of choices out there, it’s hard to decide which one is right. Think functionality and expandability. Today’s applications are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the potential of the wireless Internet. Location-based services, unified communications and others are being developed and deployed faster than you think.

“If carriers are not actively deploying (WAP) now, they’re already behind the times,” said Greg Heumann, Phone.com director of carrier marketing. “And they stand to be at a great competitive disadvantage.”

According to The Strategis Group, there will be more than 530 million wireless subscribers by 2001. Some studies say that number will break one billion by 2004, and many new phones have multimedia capabilities.

Connecting your wireless network to the Internet is a powerful proposal. And while the WAP gateway, or server, does this duty, there are a number of other functions that it performs as well.

These functions seem to separate “the men from the boys” when it comes to WAP gateways. With many companies — Infinite, Logica, Materna, Phone.com and others (Kannel offers an open-source gateway) — providing gateways that comply with WAP-Forum standards, comparisons center around ease of network integration and future expandability.

Using WAP to provide wireless Internet service to subscribers, a provider is able to keep handset costs down while offering Web services. For example, a WAP gateway typically will take over all Inter-net domain name system services to resolve domain names used in URLs, thus offloading this computing task from the handset. The gateway provides services to subscribers and gives network operators a way to manage fraud and monitor service use. The primary functionality of the WAP gateway is twofold. It acts as a protocol gateway, translating requests from the WAP protocol stack to the World Wide Web protocol stack (HTTP and TCP/IP). In addition, the gateway provides content encoders and decoders for all Web content, thus decreasing the size and number of packets flowing across the provider’s wireless data network.

One important note in choosing a WAP solution: Because vendors all subscribe to WAP-Forum standards, service providers can buy a WAP gateway from one company and still use another company’s WAP-enabled handset.

WAP Gateway Choices
Though big providers — such as Sprint PCS, with its Wireless Web; AT&T Wireless, with its recently reintroduced Digital PocketNet service; and Verizon Wireless’ new Mobile Web — already are offering unbranded WAP to subscribers, smaller providers such as U.S. Cellular still are considering their options and trialing WAP products.

U.S. Cellular on July 18 completed a successful trial of the company’s wireless Internet service in Medford, OR, teaming with Phone.com and Giant-Bear.com. The trial service enabled those customers to access e-mail, local information and business news, buy products and services, trade stocks, plan trips, and get directions.

Based on customer response, U.S. Cellular will offer wireless Internet service in many of its digital markets after finalizing service offerings and technical requirements. The provider has 2.7 million customers in 145 markets, including many medium- to small-size communities and small metro areas.

“Our system is different in that we support both CDMA and TDMA, based on geographic location,” said Larry Sipovic, U.S. Cellular product development manager. “For WAP, we have to make sure we provide ample coverage in our markets to support the quality of signal necessary for wireless Internet and wireless data transfer.”

No decisions have been made yet on equipment. U.S. Cellular is considering Phone.com, along with other WAP vendors, Sipovic said.

Beyond providing connectivity between the wireless network and the Internet, Heumann said, UP.Link WAP gateways from Phone.com feature monitoring, security, future provisioning and technical assistance.

Many providers for historical and security reasons want to operate their WAP gateways in-house. However, there are some ISPs or wireless ASPs that will operate gateways for providers.

Phone.com operates a technical-assistance center to help providers operate WAP systems and prepare for subscriber growth.

“You want to watch the number of transactions so when it’s time to scale, which in the case of UP.Link means simply adding more hardware, you can do that easily,” Heumann said.

Through the UP.Link server, providers deliver services to WAP handsets, which feature a homepage and links to sites such as Amazon.com, AOL, MSN or Yahoo.

“Obviously, most carriers can and do offer more than that,” Heumann said. “They’re interested in being more than the gateway to the Web by adding their own services to that mix. When you have the ability to put a little Web page on everybody’s phone, you change the degrees of freedom for differentiating services they’ve never had before.” Sprint PCS, for example, has modified its Wireless Web offerings many times since first launching the service — adding banking, e-mail and e-commerce functions based on Phone.com software, he said.

Nokia Networks today offers the MAX (mobile application extension) Server, which is a WAP gateway connecting a provider’s network to the Internet

via an interface with the pro-vider’s circuit-switch data network, SMS center or unstructured supplementary service data (USSD) channel, according to Steve Ballard, director of marketing. The system also interfaces to certain packet-data networks.

“The gateway will interface to a portal server,” Ballard said. “We sell to operators that want to build their own portal services. Some operators already have their own portal company or portal server, or have contracted with a third-party Internet portal.”

Nokia’s MAX Server allows providers to build a portal inside the network, which strengthens their brand with customers, Ballard said. More than 40 providers, including VoiceStream, use Nokia gateways, he said.

To prepare a network for WAP, providers must first be data-capable.

“Some of the CDMA networks are not data-capable yet,” Ballard said. “So, they have to upgrade their network to be able to support circuit-switch data, or they need to have a 2-way SMS center on their networks to allow WAP data to pass through SMS. In the future, we see both GSM and TDMA going to GPRS, or some packet-core network, which will be highly optimized for data. CDMA carriers will be using a packet-data network — either HDR or 1X to enable high-speed, packet-data traffic.”

Operationally, all WAP servers use WML. But some in the market claim WAP compliance using HTML, Ballard said.

“They call it pre-WAP,” he said. “There are filtering applications out there today that can take an HTML page and convert it on the fly to WML, using some level of artificial intelligence.”

An example is Macromedia’s Dreamweaver. Nokia worked with Macromedia to produce a WML studio that is a plug-in to Dreamweaver, which allows users to visually render information on a Nokia handset.

Ballard said Nokia is a strong advocate of WAP, and provides a solution that includes handsets, servers, portal servers, integration services, customer operations, billing and application development.

Infinite.com (formerly Infinite Technologies) makes a WAP server/gateway that takes existing WML content, converts it to packets and transmits that data to handsets, said Allan Carter, Infinite.com vice president.

Infinite.com got into wireless Internet technology three years ago when AT&T Wireless asked the company to create an e-mail solution for its PocketNet service, Carter said. Called Infinite Interchange, the e-mail server is now used by many ISPs and wireless-service providers.

“With British Telecom, they had the first WAP services with the Genie Internet service,” Carter said. “They wanted to offer content immediately so they could be first to market. They contacted us, purchased Interchange, and boom, all those POP3 mailboxes they’d been giving away for years as an Internet provider were now WAP-enabled overnight. Recently, they upgraded to an additional one million users.”

The Infinite Interchange e-mail solution works interchangeably with WAP gateways from Infinite.com as well as those made by Nokia, Phone.com and others, he said. “It’s not reliant on the total package from Infinite; you can use just part,” Carter said. “And it’s tested with nearly every device.”

To implement WAP, you need bandwidth, Carter said.

“You’re seeing early operators driving the WAP market in particular, because they have all the bandwidth,” he said. “And the ones that didn’t feel they had enough went out and spent billions of dollars on more bandwidth for the 3G things coming. The wireless Internet will evolve into something very fast and … eventually free to the consumer.”

Service providers say they will profit from volume business over the wireless Internet, which means deploying a robust infrastructure.

“It’s a matter of very powerful servers running your WAP application servers,” Carter said. “It can be high-end Sun servers. BT runs a 1,000-session Phone.com gateway on seven Sun servers. But, it doesn’t have to be that way. BT is an exception; they have a large customer base. You don’t have to have that much power to run a WAP gateway.”

Logica makes a WAP gateway as part of its m-World Portal platform.

“Part of that platform is the gateway, which is the interface to the network,” said Malachy McGuinness, Logica manager of business development in new product introduction. “In there we have different bearer modules for each type of interface — we have one for circuit-switch, one for SMS, one for USSD, and we’ll have an IP one when it moves that way. Our solution has been architected for 2G right through 3G by plugging in additional interface modules. On top of the overall solution, you have a gateway. But you also need a way of managing this. So we also have a portal for service management.”

The gateway provides protocol management, converting HTML to WML; it also provides binary coding and decoding and security.

Logica system architect Brendan McGee said that although HTML-to-WAP conversion is not defined as a part of the WAP gateway by the WAP Forum, it is a useful function many gateway providers offer.

“In our m-World framework, we provide for content conversion to be done on the fly,” McGee said. “It doesn’t reside on the WAP gateway. It is hosted in the network.” As with many new technology trends, McGuinness said many providers now are in a WAP panic.

“Everybody’s rushed out and acquired a gateway of some sort,” he said. “Now they’re wondering what to do with the gateway. The gateway is only a connectivity layer — providing connectivity and conversion between the fixed Internet and the mobile Internet. Now that they have a gateway, they are realizing they have to approach it from a subscriber’s point of view.

“The value of this is in the applications and content,” McGee continued. “Most things fail when you look at them from the technical point of view. You have to look at applications. The early applications we’ve seen are news, weather, sport and lottery. Then there’s the m-commerce field. Those are a little slower because of security issues that need to be resolved. There are several leading banks providing solutions. There’s online wireless shopping. Those are going to be key.”

Hot Applications
On the drawing board now are WAP applications such as location-based services and unified communications that Heumann thinks will become the killer application.

“Unified communications means presenting to the user a view of their world that, regardless of where they are and what device they have access to at the moment, they can communicate without having to have multiple e-mail addresses, multiple phone numbers and so forth,” he said. “It means the integration of electronic mail, voice mail, fax and instant messaging in such a fashion that I can access that information and interact with it using voice commands, listening by voice, replying by voice, as well as visually interacting with my phone, as well as visually interacting with a PC. This is really a key application that the world hasn’t experienced yet.”

Other applications that could become popular in the near future include stock quotes and horoscopes (no one will admit it, but it’s true). And, of course, e-mail.

“This is something that everybody who hears about and hasn’t yet experienced is skeptical about,” Heumann said. “The way they believe e-mail works is necessarily tied in with their understanding of how they’ve seen it, which is on a 17-inch monitor,” Heumann said. “Phones are not for composing the Gettysburg Address, and they’re not for reading it.”

Many future applications will have to correctly gauge consumer expectations, which have been created by computers.

After its WAP trial last month, U.S. Cellular polled participants. Sipovic said response was strong.

“They were using it a lot more substantially than we thought,” he said.

However, the trial found that some users had high expectations based on their PC Web experiences.

“One of the things that will polarize those who want to use wireless Internet will be what direction they start from with their expectations,” Sipovic said. “If you’re a soccer mom trying to find out what the weather’s going to be like tomorrow… your expectations for a phone are going to be different from someone who wants to display the trend analysis for life insurance policies.”

Network Evolution
Application development for WAP will really take off with continued network evolution, according to Nokia’s Ballard.

“When we get to these higher-speed networks, these packet-data networks, it will open up a whole new area for applications,” he said. “Very creative people out in Silicon Valley are going to find ways to use that performance by building richer applications and being able to provide richer data. That will, of course, spur the need for more powerful handsets and better user interfaces and better screens supporting color and video and all kinds of applications we can’t even dream of yet.”

Danish software developer Infologi.com in late July announced that it has developed what it claims to be the world’s first commercially available WAP-cam, which transmits images to a WAP phone from any video or Web camera.

Future generations of WAP applications likely will operate on an IP-core network, according to many in the industry.

“There are a lot of things coming in the networks themselves that’s not typically WAP-related, but will enhance the WAP experience,” Ballard said. “IP will be used for data transport in the future. As we push toward 3G systems, things will be 100% IP-core, supporting IP version 6, the new version of IP that has just gone through standards testing. As early as next year, Nokia will be delivering systems — GPRS systems — that are supporting IP version 6 already.”

It’s possible that everyday appliances such as refrigerators — not just phones or computers — will be given IP addresses, and will thus be controllable via wireless devices.

By implementing WAP-based solutions to launch wireless data, service providers are able to communicate with subscribers in an entirely new way — through visuals on phone screens. Using the WAP gateway, providers also can track and bill for services, provision services remotely and therefore maintain control of the data connection. Opening the gate to the wireless Internet today will have vast implications tomorrow.