Pain in the App

With all of the networks, devices, gateways, applications, microbrowsers and markup languages, troubleshooting wireless data in no easy task.

How difficult is it to get that Yahoo stock update loaded onto your phone's screen? It's only three lines of simple text, so how hard could it be? Carriers, vendors and application developers will tell you it's a lot harder than you think.

Testing a WAP or wireless Internet application is not a delicate art. It's not about fine-tuning or careful measurement. It's a triage. Troubleshooting a wireless data application doesn't involve making it behave optimally on all networks, on all devices and over all gateways. It involves simply throwing everything at the app and praying that it works at least some of the time.

“You're almost forced to craft applications to account for every limitation of every network and every handset instead of actually testing them,” said Dale Gonzalez, Air2Web (www.air2web.com) vice president of wireless development. “It really gets quite nasty.”

The problems go beyond simple equipment-compatibility issues to encompass the varying qualities of individual networks, the devices being deployed and the underlying protocols, Gonzalez said. In North America, carriers are transmitting data over both circuit- and packet-switched networks. Handsets come in numerous form factors, displaying anywhere from three to 11 or more lines of text. There are three major competing microbrowsers: those developed by Openwave (www.openwave.com), Nokia (www.nokia.com) and Ericsson (www.ericsson.com), not to mention other device-specific browsers developed by companies such as Palm (www.palm.com) and Research In Motion (www.rim.net).

Markup languages are even more numerous than browsers: There is HDML, full WAP 1.1- compliant WML and even outdated versions of WML. Also, AT&T Wireless (www.attws.com) is gearing up to introduce NTT DoCoMo's (www.nttdocomo.com) cHTML to the North American market, and the WAP Forum is finalizing standards for WAP 2.0 (www.wapforum.com), which is based on XHTML.

Beyond that, developers still have to deal with the gross disparities among North American wireless networks, Gonzalez said.

“It's where you are on a network and at what time,” he said. “How do I get accurate measures of latency when the networks vary so broadly? And I mean broadly.”

Signal strength and capacity are huge problems in testing because they vary depending on where users are in the network and when they are trying to access it. Except for CDPD networks, data users still are sharing the same channels with voice traffic. The more traffic on the network or the further a user is from the cell site, the more latency over the connection.

Also, carriers configure their networks differently. One might set its gateways to time out after a certain amount of inactivity — a period another carrier might find perfectly acceptable. The challenge, Gonzalez said, is establishing reasonable parameters for testing and measurement when faced with all of these disparate scenarios.

From Lab to Real World

Air2Web establishes “bands of connectivity,” approximate conditions deemed as acceptable, though not optimal, for wireless data transmission. It begins testing an application in the lab over basic user interfaces. It'll test to see how each handset and each embedded microbrowser loads and displays the information, how easy it is to access different screen views and how fast each view loads under these optimal circumstances. After Air2Web has certified the application itself, the real testing begins, Gonzalez said.

“As important as betas are in the wired world, they're triple critical in the wireless world because there's crazy stuff out there you can't account for,” Gonzalez said. “Being able to partition the testing burden correctly is critical.”

Air2Web will test an application's performance not only over all of the major networks, but also in specific geographic areas where traffic is expected to be highest and where an application's customer base is expected to be largest. Air2Web also keeps its own databases of problem areas in the United States where data traffic is high and service quality low. By spot testing in these areas, it can see how the application performs under the most adverse conditions.

Because networks constantly evolve, the best Air2Web can do is approximate how an application will perform when faced with different operational scenarios. Air2Web's customers then must decide whether those parameters meet their requirements enough to deploy the application.

Note that Air2Web is testing on behalf of its customers, the content providers, which means getting their applications to work on the broadest range of platforms and networks. Such an approach isn't one carriers always agree with. Carriers want applications optimized to their networks, to their handsets and to their portals. And there lies the essential conflict between carriers and content providers delving into the wireless Internet.

The Data Testers

A whole cottage industry has sprung up around wireless data testing. Several companies offer advice to carriers about how to improve the quality of their services, and they provide precise data on where their services are lacking and how to fix them.

Mspect, which launched at the end of April (www.mspect.com), takes a hands-on approach to testing. The company has set up wireless “safe houses” in major metropolitan markets containing handsets linked to each local provider's data services. Those phones, in turn, are hooked up to computers that monitor individual data services on a periodic basis or as part of a specific testing scenario.

“We're focusing on replicating the end-user experience,” said Mark Adams, Mspect CEO.

Adams said the distributed network works like a gigantic diagnostic tool — one that's always on. When one safe house detects a problem in the network, the other safe houses gang up on the problem, using their combined resources to triangulate and isolate the culprit. The distributed network can identify when a network element is down or when a service isn't working properly and notify the carrier immediately.

What's more, Mspect is pretty cocky about how critical services like its own are to making wireless data work. Adams said Mspect's distributed network already has detected SMS and mobile Internet outages lasting more than 48 hours and affecting whole regions of the country. On which carrier's network, you may ask? Maybe you'll figure it out next time you can't load your Yahoo stock update.

Cingular's Singular Issues

More than most other major carriers in the United States, Cingular Wireless (www.cingular.com) faces code-compatibility issues with its data services. Cingular has been deploying wireless browsing services that are fully WAP 1.1 compliant over its GSM and TDMA networks. Because other U.S. carriers are using HDML, and the largest wireless Internet players are using Openwave's (www.openwave.com) UP.browsers, most content providers are churning out their apps in HDML.

“One of the leading problems we've had is a content problem,” said Rob Hyatt, Cingular director of data service marketing. “We have a long technical lead-in time to get our partners to bring their services to WAP compliance.”

Cingular wants content providers to optimize their portals and applications to work on Cingular handsets and microbrowsers. With its content partners, this isn't a problem because they have contracts with the carrier, but outside providers are harder to convince.

Cingular has set up a 3-tier system for testing wireless data applications over its networks. The first tier involves content it receives from partner InfoSpace (www.infospace.com), all of which is written in WML and optimized specifically for Cingular's browsers. The second tier involves partners such as Bloomberg (www.bloomberg.com) that Cingular has contracts with, but not exclusive contracts. The final tier encompasses outside sites Cingular users can access through bookmarks and punching in URLs.

Cingular tries to tune its browsers to read as much free-floating code as possible, but partner portals that generate revenue take precedence, Hyatt said.

The carrier's testing issues go beyond the fight over markup languages. Not only does it have to test applications to its equipment, it has to test new equipment to its applications. Every time a new handset is deployed, it has to be tested back through the network, over the gateway to the application.

“We have to test all handsets to see just how they will display information,” said Kris Rinne, vice president for technology and product realization. “We have to ‘tune’ every handset to our service.”