No Apologies

In spite of WAP's growing pains, Scott Goldman, WAP Forum CEO, sees a bright future for the standard.

Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me. At about 12 months old, the WAP protocol has undergone significant shaping, rewriting and testing. In the shadow of the larger Internet-browser standards, it has taken its share of bullying and name-calling. First, critics declared WAP dead or at least tap-dancing on its own grave. Second, with the Qualcomm IPR issues still a fresh wound for the wireless industry, the WAP Forum has had to contend with the Geoworks-Phone.com squabble as it became public and ugly. Then there were accusations that WAP solutions weren't interoperable.

In spite of the squabbles, WAP has garnered the support of more than 530 industry peers from wireless-service providers, infrastructure providers, software developers and content providers. The detractors' criticisms haven't stopped the WAP Forum and its supporters. In fact, collectively they only have dug in deeper, carefully crafting the wireless-browser standard.

As WAP Forum CEO, Scott Goldman has taken a licking or two in his day. However, he isn't put off when asked about the problems that have cropped up. In fact, Goldman is more philosophical than apologetic.

IPR Ipso Facto
Earlier this year, Geoworks claimed it owned the IPR for a flexible user-interface patent. Last month, it implemented new licensing terms. The current introductory annual royalty rate for licensing the technology is $20,000. Although IPR negotiation is a common practice within technology circles, small developing companies expressed concern, suggesting they couldn't afford the licensing fee.

The bylaws of the WAP Forum provide no mechanism to deal with licensing issues, saying IPR disputes must be negotiated and resolved by those individual companies — the licensee and the licensor.

"If people knew everything that went on behind the scenes in the WAP Forum, they would look at this public issue going on between Geoworks and Phone.com as kind of an aberration," Goldman said. "There have been a number of other licenses agreed to behind the scenes — licensing on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms, as our agreement states. It's been a common practice within the forum."

When Geoworks took its request public in January of this year, Goldman explained the WAP Forum's only position was a hands-off one, encouraging all of the parties to work among themselves to develop a reasonable and practical solution.

"Would we like to see these things resolved? Of course," Goldman said. "Are they a distraction for us? Yes. Is there anything further we can do about it? No."

Neither Goldman nor the WAP Forum Chairman Gregory Williams thinks the IPR issue has detracted from the overall positive developments during the last year.

Since the IPR issue first was raised publicly, Williams said the WAP Forum has more than doubled in size, with the majority of growth coming from application developers and content providers.

"It's a distraction at times," Williams said. "But I don't believe it has stopped WAP from becoming an open standard for everybody. There's got to be equilibrium in the market so the customer gets value, the carrier makes money, the terminal manufacturers make money, the WAP gateway provider makes money, and the content provider makes money. Until all of those things are in equilibrium, we're just a brand new industry working through that."

Goldman agreed, adopting his familiar philosophical view.

"There are always two alternatives: negotiate or litigate," Goldman said. "We always hope people will negotiatefirst. But failing that, that's what the legal system is all about."

No Legs?
Rumors about WAP's demise have been greatly exaggerated, if you ask Goldman. The naysayers have said WAP doesn't have the legs; it will die once 3G is implemented; and probably most offensive is the claim that WAP content is "immature, poor and generally difficult to navigate."

Goldman is not chagrined by these critiques.

"People are looking at this technology through a prism of what they want it to be rather than what the technology can be," Goldman said. He compared WAP with the Internet by using a buffet-and-room-service metaphor:

"Using a Web browser on your PC is like going to a buffet," he said. "You can go place to place, put a little on your dish. You can look at all of the things that are available to you very easily. Using a WAP service is much more like using room service. You look at a menu, see what you want, order it, and it's delivered to you. It's a much different user experience."

The only criticism that Goldman will accept is that of managing expectations. He said the forum and the industry haven't done as good of a job managing the expectations of WAP customers.

"It's not surfing the Web on your cell phone with a 2-inch-square screen and 12 keys rather than a full keyboard," Goldman said. "It's much more of a task-specific extension to your PC."

Goldman explained it's similar to the type of extension that a Palm Pilot provides for your PC. Although you can't do everything on the Palm Pilot that you can do on a PC, the device does perform specific functions extremely well. Goldman predicts that WAP will follow the same success curve as the Palm Pilot for the same reason: It performs specific functions extremely well.

"It's not designed to replace browsing the Web on your PC," Goldman said. "Anybody who looks at WAP that way will surely be disappointed by WAP.

"If you looked at e-mail as having the same personality as a handwritten letter on stationary that has sealing wax on the envelope, people would say that e-mail would be dead too," Goldman philosophized. "The truth of the matter is e-mail is highly functional and extremely efficient. It has proved to be a wild success. The same thing is going to happen with WAP."

Is there a killer app for WAP phones? According to Goldman, the answer is no.

"But there are about 1,000 manslaughter apps for it," he countered. "It's so beautifully functional when you know what it is that you want to do and when you see it on the menu."

For those consumers who want a device with a bigger screen, more keys and the same Internet experience, Goldman said, "Great. We already have those. They're called laptops. Go get one and carry it around with you."

He explains that he, like many other consumers, doesn't want to lug a laptop around, preferring only to carry a wireless phone.

"It's a different experience," Goldman said. "When people begin to recognize that it puts the information that they want on the device that they have already chosen to carry, there's going to be a huge acceptance to WAP."

Living in a Secure World
As WAP phones begin to proliferate, wireless e-commerce, data transfer and other security-sensitive applications will become the norm. Currently, the wireless transport layer security (WTLS) protocol defines security in the WAP standard. In the WAP protocol stack, WTLS is the layer directly above the transport protocol layer. Each individual WAP application must engage the security function. In theory, WTLS is similar to the TLS protocol, the Internet Engineering Task Force's standard for securing Internet browsing. WTLS guarantees data-origin authentication, confidentiality, data integrity and entity authentication between two applications.

"We are working on end-to-end security," Goldman said.

He predicted that it would be available by the end of September, and it also would have support for public key infrastructure.

According to Goldman, today's spec already accounts sufficiently for security. Although a lot of the security concerns place the blame on WAP, Goldman insists that the security is built into the specification.

"Whether or not they (wireless-service providers) choose to turn that on when they implement a WAP service through a gateway, that's a different issue," Goldman said.

"You take the heat for a lot of stuff that gets done in the marketplace that are implementation issues — how the carriers decide to implement it, how the handset manufacturers put it in their handsets. The spec itself deals with a lot of this stuff. How people choose to implement it is something you can't control once it gets outside of the standards body and into the commercial world," Goldman said.

Melissa Meets I Love You
In the Internet world, some say you aren't a success until hackers write a virus for you. As an extension of the Internet, do WAP consumers need to be concerned about viruses? Goldman said no.

A virus by definition is something rogue or illegal that is spread by replicating the code and transmitting it from device to device. Although WAP doesn't have specific virus prevention built in, it doesn't have to. According to Goldman, there's no mechanism available for the replication and transmission of any kind of rogue code. It doesn't exist in the programming. For example, wireless e-mail is accessed via the wireless device from the PC or the server. Most WAP mail services tap into the PoP3 server. It leaves the mail on the server so the subscriber can pick it up from his PC. If you consider the I Love You virus as an example, its code is written as an executable code that can't be executed on a WAP phone. The programming itself is different.

Goldman further explained that there is no way to open attachments in e-mails, the action that set off the Melissa, I Love You and other viruses. Even if you could open an attachment, the executable code requires the PC's operating system to execute it.

Conformance Performance
Newer WAP gateway introductions promise to support all terminals. Earlier product introductions couldn't make that same claim. One of the key tenets in building the WAP specification is backward compatibility, and as the standard has matured, interoperability has improved. For example, if you have the version 1.3 conformance release, you'll still be able to use your version 1.2 phone much the same way that Netscape or Explorer worked. However, you won't be able to take advantage of the version 1.3 new features unless you have the newer software release.

"There are lots of phones, gateways and sites that are in the interoperability pipeline right now," Goldman said. "Interoperability began a long time ago. When phone and gateway manufacturers were building their own things, they tested everything against as much other stuff as they could get."

Individual companies handled early product introductions attempting to test their products with as many terminals as they could obtain. For example, if Nokia built a browser, it had to obtain phones from all of the phone vendors, which is difficult for a single company to do. In March, the WAP Forum launched a compliance-testing suite. It allows vendors to feed their products through the compliance pipeline to make sure they work with all of the other available products. The third-party testing facility offers a reference pool of all of these products. When a company submits a new version of its browser, it can be tested against all of those phones to make sure it is interoperable.

Goldman explained that the interoperability issue resulted from natural evolution. Comparing it to the early days of Netscape and Explorer, he recalled there were sites that were built for one browser or the other. As time went by, some sites were tweaked to be better on one browser or another, but you still could get to every site using either browser.

Moving forward, WAP Forum members continue to hammer out issues such as interoperability, security, roaming and Internet compatibility. The forum has emphasized working in tandem with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and other Internet committees. While the WAP Forum focuses on enabling advanced services and applications on wireless devices, the W3C focuses on leadin g and advancing the development of the World Wide Web. Although the two organizations have distinct organizational goals, the WAP Forum wants to share the future of the global-information space and avoid unnecessary divergence between the recommendations and standards of the two organizations.

Direct overlaps in future development occur in the areas of intelligent proxies and protocol design; of XML applications; and in content adoption such as through the use of vector graphics and style sheets. Instead of developing diverging sets of solutions, it's the intent of both groups to find common solutions.

According to Goldman, transparent interoperability with the Internet is the only way for WAP to continue on its successful drive, even when critics are dishing out the dirt.

"If you look at it as evolutionary, the process has been remarkably accelerated," Goldman said. "To see where it has come in a year and the amount of controversy it has generated in a year indicates to me that there is a clear demand for products of this type."

---

Certification Program & Policy

The WAP Forum offers a comprehensive certification and interoperability testing program that covers device testing, content verification and a set of authoring guidelines to assist developers in providing interoperable WAP applications and services. The WAP Forum Conformance Process and Policy Document governs the WAP Forum Certification Program. The use of the logo and all other WAP Forum trademarks are governed by the License Agreement. Significant highlights of the device-certification process are outlined below.

1. A manufacturer will receive a license to display or use the WAP Forum logo once its product has passed the certification test suite, and it has agreed to all the required terms.

2. A certified product will be subject to recertification annually.

3. All product information supplied to the certification authority will be treated as confidential. However, if requested, the manufacturer must provide proof of compliance and certification.

4. The WAP Forum certification authority may, from time to time, audit test results and/or request proof that products remain in compliance with the requirements outlined in the policy document.

---

WAP's Goals

The objectives of the WAP Forum are:

• To bring Internet content and advanced data services to digital cellular phones and other wireless terminals

• To create a global wireless-protocol specification that will work across different wireless-network technologies

• To enable the creation of content and applications that scale across a wide range of wireless bearer networks and wireless-device types

• To embrace and extend existing standards and technology wherever appropriate.

Source: www.wapforum.org

---

IPRs Strike WAP
By Betsy Harter

First it was Qualcomm, claiming rights to CDMA. Then it was Motorola, saying it owned exclusive rights to the clamshell form factor for wireless phones. Every time you blink, a company in the wireless industry files an IPR.

Not even WAP is safe. Last January, Geoworks announced that it holds essential IPRs for the WAP specification, and it established a licensing program to make this IPR available to all WAP Forum members. Phone.com filed a lawsuit against Geoworks in April, alleging that the patent is invalid and unenforceable, and stating that Phone.com does not infringe the patent. Geoworks counter-sued in June, claiming that Phone.com is infringing its patent.

The IPR spat between Geoworks and Phone.com is not likely to be the last WAP-related suit, either. Andrew Cole, Renaissance Worldwide wireless practice head and a Geoworks board of directors member, foresees "a handful" of WAP-related IPRs coming down the pipe.

"It won't be a huge flood of them, but there will be others," he said. "There are a number of players that have IPR claims to other various elements of WAP."

Cole added that as long as companies file IPR patents within WAP-Forum guidelines, there is nothing wrong with a company obtaining revenue by licensing its technology.

"A lot of people have created a great meal with different types of vegetables and meat, and this meal is WAP," Cole said. "But the development that went into growing those vegetables and identifying the right menu came from other companies; it is part of their heritage and lifeblood.

Some WAP backers fear that IPRs in the WAP world will create confusion, or that the IPR licensing fees will force companies that would normally develop or deploy WAP applications to choose another route. However, if patents are honest and fair, the industry should come to terms with them, Cole said.

"The bottom line is that no one likes to pay revenue to a company; everyone would love to have (technology) for free if they could," Cole said. "For years, other players hated the fact that they had to pay big money to Qualcomm to use CDMA protocols, but it invested a lot of time and money, and it based the whole company on CDMA."

Cole and other industry leaders do not fear that IPRs will slow WAP development. John Yuzdepski, Sprint PCS vice president of Sprintpcs.com, said the WAP Forum has procedures to handle IPRs, and he is confident that the industry will find a way to work around IPR issues.

"I am always impressed at how resilient this industry is; it is all about delivering value to customers," Yuzdepski said.

Even the companies involved in this most recent patent lawsuit don't think that IPRs will hinder WAP.

"Geoworks' claims cover a very small part of WAP, so we do not see this patent issue as slowing down WAP at all," said Ben Linder, Phone.com vice president of marketing. "The players in the wireless industry and WAP are big boys. They know how to deal with patents, and most of them have patents of their own."

Rhonda Jobe, Geoworks vice president of marketing, pointed out that patent lawsuits are common in the computer industry and they have not slowed down computer-technology development.

"This lawsuit is between Geoworks and Phone.com, so it doesn't affect others," Jobe said. "Our goal is not to slow down WAP; it would be foolish for us to do that because a big part of our business is SMS and WAP services."

Harter (betsyharter@aol.com) is a freelance writer based in Athens, GA.