At the heart of the effort is a drive to leverage the groundwork laid by W3C in hopes of converging HTML subsets and variants into a common subset of XHTML. The W3C has produced a working draft of XHTML Basic, edited by three companies, two of which have been in direct competition: Phone.com (Redwood City, Calif.), which pioneered WAP, and Access Co. (Tokyo), which designed Compact HTML, the underlying markup language for i-Mode. The third player, Panasonic, is joining the collaboration to seek a common ground for future markup languages aimed at content for small information appliances.

The WAP Forum, using W3C's working draft, is scheduled to complete the first draft of the WAP 2.0 spec in September and to roll out the next-generation WAP specifications before year's end.

"The next generation WAP spec will essentially converge WAP protocols with Internet standards," said Peter King, chief architect at Phone.com.

Compatibility concerns

Sources close to those developing WAP 2.0, however, noted that debates are heating up within the WAP Forum over the issue of backward compatibility, as software vendors, cell phone OEMs and wireless service providers scramble to ensure a WAP follow-on that comes as close as possible to their current wireless data service implementations.

Phone.com's King said he expects the new markup language in WAP 2.0 will maintain maintain "compatibility with the previous Wireless Markup Language WML" used in today's WAP.

OEMs designing next-generation handsets are caught in the crossfire. If the WAP 2.0 spec "mandates" backward compatibility with the current WML rather than make it an option, "cell phone manufacturers such as Panasonic, Nokia and Ericsson will have to bear the burden of doubling code size — thus doubling the memory required in a handset — to support separate WML- and XHTML-enabled browsers," warned Kiyoyasu Oishi, vice president of marketing at Access Systems America Inc. (Milpitas, Calif.), a subsidiary of Tokyo-based Access.

System OEMs, however, say they have yet to encounter design requirements for i-Mode capability in handsets sold outside Japan. Muzibul H. Khan, senior director of product management and engineering for wireless terminals at Samsung Telecommunications America Inc. (Richardson, Texas), confirmed the relative lack of demand for i-Mode in other countries. In the North American market, Khan said, there have been "requests for HTML- or XML-enabled handsets but not for i-Mode-specific" equipment. But he added that it "is a very dynamic market, and everything is possible."

As for WAP 2.0, Khan said he hopes the market will adopt "a standard solution that is versatile enough to support emerging applications." But he conceded that "there will always be issues regarding return on the already invested capital."

That is not to downplay the momentum of i-Mode, whose subscriber base has surpassed 9.2 million in Japan. Buoyed by those numbers, NTT Docomo is reportedly on a spending spree in Europe. It hopes to introduce its proprietary service there, timing the rollout with the debut of General Packet Radio System (GPRS) and 3G multimedia services.

The Japanese wireless giant announced two weeks ago that it will collaborate with two other leading mobile operators — Hutchison Whampoa Limited and KPN Mobile N.V. — on 3G mobile multimedia service in Europe. The partners will pursue 3G licenses covering target markets in the United Kingdom, Germany, France and Belgium. The partners will also share the cost of developing their 3G business, while generating economies of scale in product development, network procurement and content, according to NTT Docomo.

WAP assailed

WAP is under scrutiny in Europe, where detractors have described the service as over-hyped and under-delivered. Indeed, the broad support for WAP among service providers and mobile handset vendors has not been matched among service subscribers. Published numbers for the total WAP market are unavailable. But Phone.com, the largest provider of WAP uplink servers and WAP browsers, said this past week that active users of Phone.com's products worldwide recently exceeded 4.1 million — less than half the number of i-Mode subscribers.

Nicolas Lorain, senior product manager for wireless at Sun Microsystems' consumer and embedded group, said "incompatible WAP devices and WAP gateways designed by different vendors" are hampering the growth of the service. The compatibility problems extend to WML and the Handheld Device Markup Language (HDML), the Phone.com-developed precursor to WML.

There was no test suite for WAP until WAP 1.1's arrival. Lorain predicted that it will take another eight to 12 months for the test suite to permeate the market and for the interoperability issues to be ironed out.

But a more significant problem with WAP may be that "many people misunderstood what WAP can do," he said. "WAP is a way to access data information, but it cannot access the Internet through the mobile device." Web information must be rewritten in WML and its transport protocols transcoded at a WAP uplink server to display the data on a Web client with a small screen, no keyboard and no mouse.

The i-Mode scheme allows Internet content to be accessed by the mobile phone, although the way the information is displayed may not be optimal for a small screen on a handset, said Joe Leung, president of Access Systems America.

Sun's Lorain said NTT Docomo "was very smart to choose Compact HTML, a markup language that is a pure subset of HTML," since it eliminates the learning curve for Web masters.

WAP's proponents say its advantage is broad support among vendors and platforms. "i-Mode is a technology for displaying data on a mobile phone implemented by one company, while WAP is an open, global standard supported by 530 companies," said Natasha Flaherty, senior marketing manager for the Asia-Pacific region at Phone.com. Moreover, while i-Mode service is designed for access by a wireless packet network, WAP works over circuit- and packet-switched networks — including GSM, code- or time-division multiple access, or Japan's Personal Digital Communications (PCD) or Personal Handyphone System (PHS) — through a proxy gateway connecting the wireless mobile and wired PC worlds. WAP relies not on TCP/IP but on datagram protocols — the "lowest common denominators" that work across disparate network infrastructures.

But Oishi of Access argued that the "underlying technologies of i-Mode are much more Internet-friendly, since they were built for a packet-switched network and with upcoming 3G services in mind."

Numbers talk

Not everyone is confident of NTT Docomo's ability to attract Europe to i-Mode. "Europeans are truly committed to WAP," said Ray Jodoin, principal analyst for wireless deployment at Cahners In-Stat Group. "Just as most of the world did not accept Japan's PDC or PHS, i-Mode is yet another technology that NTT Docomo wants to push but that probably won't be embraced."

But Access' Oishi, pointing to i-Mode's staggering growth in Japan, said simply that "the numbers talk."

Internet service providers already smell money around i-Mode. America Online Inc. this week was reported to be in discussions with NTT Docomo on joint development of a global Internet access service for cell phones, but neither company would comment at press time.

WAP's biggest enemy may not be i-Mode but its own road map. Today's WAP, based on circuit-switched data, requires long connection time and time-based charging, making the service expensive. The ideal combination is said to be "WAP plus packet data" — GPRS on GSM, for example. The downside is that the development of those infrastructures, and the terminals to run them, is out of step with the development of WAP.

The gap between what WAP can do and what it is promised to deliver a few years from now is frustrating an already confused population of European mobile users. Widespread deployment of packet-data networks will not occur until late 2000 or 2001. A move to packet-data networks will require a terminal change. And that means many users may simply choose to delay upgrading their terminals, resulting in an even slower take-up of WAP.

As the wireless data industry migrates to WAP 2.0, more questions arise. Plans for the next-generation service are more accommodating of the Internet, adopting a common markup language and transport protocols. That leads some observers to ask whether adoption of the current-generation WAP is justifiable.

Others point out that WAP is not driving mobile commerce as much as had been hoped, because the protocol is not believed to provide sufficient security for banking and e-commerce. Noting the limitations of wireless transport layer security, WAP detractors noted that encryption and decryption need to be performed at the WAP gateway. To some content and service providers, the absence of end-to-end security or of the ability to allow secure socket layer (SSL) tunneling in WAP is unacceptable.

Accommodation of Java is another open question. While WML and Compact HTML can display static information, Java is needed to download and execute dynamic content, Sun's Lorain said, adding that Java can solve "the limitation of today's microbrowser-based technology."

While NTT Docomo said it is committed to bringing Java applications to its i-Mode service later this year, it is unclear how the WAP world might migrate to the programming language. Phone.com's King would not comment on the company's Java strategy.