This is just a quick observation based on discussions with my colleagues, most notably Steve, but it appears that the death of WAP is nigh. US Cellular's WAP-free 1x rollout the other day is another sign that the industry is chucking WAP into the 3DO junk heap (i guess it should be called the iridium junk heap since that was a far more collossal failure).
WAP was never a very compelling way to do anything, and the early industry leader, phone.com/openwave, had such notoriously poor customer service, that operators looking to upgrade services were always motivated to look elsewhere for vendors. The first 1x rollouts like Sprint went with alternative WAP Gateway providers, but it appears that future data services offerings will begin to lack a WAP presence at all.
Posted by Dick at October 5, 2003 10:10 AM | TrackBack