The Register reported yesterday on the news that T-Mobile is terminating its old CSD-WAP internet service for customers on their mobile network, and urging them instead to make a step into the 21st century by switching to a GPRS or 3G connection instead.
CSD-WAP is the mobile equivalent of dial-up access; your phone calls a number, and you're connected to the internet at the kind of speeds that barely allow you to download a couple of emails. If you're lucky. What's incredible in hindsight is that CSD-WAP was trumpeted seven or eight years ago as cutting-edge, almost futuristic – but was so unusable that the term "WAP" has become, as Bill Ray points out in the article, strictly verboten by mobile phone companies.
When mobile phones started to be described as internet-ready, we probably expected to have a vaguely similar online experience to the ones we were having on our spanking new broadband connections at home or at work.
But unlike today, where phones with large screens and 3G connections do a reasonable job of displaying regular web pages, older phones struggled to even display the most basic information on their WAP browsers. And the onus was on information providers to create special, slimmed-down WAP sites that could be accessed over CSD connections – but only technologically curious people were bothering to visit them, and they were quickly giving up when they realised that it was easier to wait until they got to a proper computer.
WAP came to be ridiculed as a "Worthless Application Protocol" – purely because way too much was expected of it.
The one advantage of CSD dial-up? Because it was a regular phone call it was included in your free minutes – while the newly introduced GPRS was charged at the kind of rates that made grown men cry when the monthly bill arrived.
Anyway, another formely revolutionary technology bites the dust. It won't be fondly remembered, but it did lay the groundwork for me to be able to watch this video on my phone when I was out and about yesterday evening – so perhaps we have a lot to be grateful for, eh.
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WAP has the advantage of being usable where there is no 3G, mobile broadband or any computor access in fact, and you can quite easily download a few emails etc in reality, hectic idiot.
Posted by: 666 | Thursday, 12 June 2008 at 02:29 PM
..WAP is also useful because you can download emails automatically (like with texts) without logging onto the web. (and send them of course). That is the essentially bit. Video conferencing calls, video downloads are not esesential.
I think you can also live stream low bit rate audio with WAP (like dial up internet).
Sounds like this:
http://www.deadlybuda.com/webcast.html
Posted by: 666 | Thursday, 12 June 2008 at 02:52 PM
WAP's just a protocol, a gateway between the phone and the internet. But whether you're referring to CSD, GPRS, 3G or whatever, they all involve "logging on to the web".
Everyone has different ideas of what's essential. I'm sure the vast majority of people have no need whatsoever to even check their email on their phone.
But anyway, the point was (and the point holds) that GPRS and 3G have rendered CSD utterly obsolete.
Posted by: Rhodri Marsden | Thursday, 12 June 2008 at 03:00 PM