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Editor's Note: David Li has been a long time supporter of Enhydra. Back in 1999, he observed that Enhydra XMLC and its DOM foundation were an ideal combination for embracing WML and wireless development. He then contributed the code that set the stage for extending Enhydra XMLC to become the versatile presentation technology that it is today.

 

Wireless in Asia

David Li, Digitalsesame Founder

It has been over a year since DigitalSesame brought WAP support to Enhydra. It's a good time to review what has been going on with WAP and wireless data access in general and Asia in particular.

WAP is the most hyped marketing word in 2000. Nokia, Ericssion, Motorola and countless wireless telecom operators spend tens of millions of marketing funds to prompt it. The marketing has reached about just about everyone.

Since DigitalSesame is a "WAP" company, I had to face the nightmare common to any techie. Mom asked me what's the WAP thingie she has been hearing and seeing all over the place. So, I took out the Nokia 7110 and showed her a couple sites we had built. Well... After 10 minutes of demo, mom looked at me with all these questions in her eye: "Is this what you do at work?"

This started making me wonder whether WAP was a "everyone and their mom will rush out to grab" technology or just a high powered marketing play by the telecom industry. What went wrong? What was missing?

Looking at over a year of experience dealing with telecom operators, WAP start ups and WAP content providers, I have discovered a thing or two that I'd like to share with readers of this newsletter.

First, the culture clash between Internet and telecom. The flourish of Internet business is about David vs Goliath. Everyone gets a shot at the giant. That's why Internet has flourished to become a defining moment in the history.

However, telecom operators have made WAP play more like the Highlander. All the telecom operators are running arround getting an exclusive deal with big content providers. Just like in the movie, "There can be only one!" This telecom mentality really kills WAP. The people who used to run your phone services now have the exclusive power to dictate what you see on this little screen. Well, Internet doesn't work that way and WAP won't flourish unless given the same ground.

Secondly, there is the over-marketing and under-manufacturing by the phone providers. In the beginning of this year, WAP stood for "Where Are the Phones?" It was a big marketing campaign started without the ability to back up the demand. In Asia, people change phones every six to nine months and everyone is always looking for the newest phone. The WAP phone supply met the demand by killing the demand.

Plus, the first generation of WAP phones, Nokia 7110, Ericssion R320, Motorola 2000i are big, ugly and clumpy. This was introduced to the Asian market when everyone wants a lightweight phone from Japan, some of them less than half a ounce.

Third, a technology barrier was created by WML. WML is an application of XML and follows the XML standard. it creates a barrier of entry for designers who who are only familiar with HTML.

On top of this, WML does not support pages in local encoding. For example, we use Big5 encoding to represent Chinese in Taiwan and that's what most people are familiar with when it comes to Chinese computing. However, WML does not support Big5. WML is Unicode only. Believe it or not, the most frequently asked question for us is "How do you display Chinese on the phone?" Lots of time and human resource are wasted just to deal with these basic issues and not much more energy left remains for developing amazing service.

NTT DoCoMo's iMode, the most successful Internet on the phone service, has grown from zero to twenty million subscribers in a little more than a year. It uses compact HTML which is a small subset of HTML and support locale encoding.

So, is wireless data on the phone doomed? Quite the contrary. The telecoms have learned a thing or two in the past year about the Internet and we have been seeing a lot of change in the way they deal with WAP. NTT DoCoMo is bringing iMode service to the world and are pushing big changes in the WAP standards. Now, WAP 2.0 will be based on XHTML which are is familiar to HTML designers.

We will be looking at the wireless data year in 2001. There are a whole new set of challanges ahead but we will finally see the potential of wireless data.

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