What is WAP?

Although smart phone competition among iPhone, Droid, Nexus One, Blackberry, and Palm Pre is red hot, not everyone has a smart phone and actually most people still use simpler and much cheaper phones. According to New York Times article Firms Selling Apps for Simple Phones,"roughly 82 percent of cellphones in use are limited-function phones, the kind that typically sell for less than $50 or are given away with a two-year service contract."

These traditional phones can also access Internet. In Asian coutnries like China, WAP is still very popular to access Internet. So what is WAP? Here WAP stands for Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), not Wireless Access Point. It is a suite of protocol of wireless communications. It usally runs on 2G mobile network, like GSM, CDMA, and GPRS.

What is the difference between WAP and GSM/CDMA? Using analogy, some people consider GSM/CDMA as highway and WAP as vehicle on the highway. Using more technical terms (TCP/IP and OSI), GSM/CDMA provides lower level data link/physical layer and WAP provider higher layer (UDP, HTTP) and some a markup language WML (Wirless Markup Language), similar with HTML.

People can use WAP to browse websites, check emails, track sports scores, etc. In Japan, NTT DoCoMo offers i-mode as a competitor of WAP. But KDDI and SoftBank mobile use WAP.

Do not be confused about WAP and WAPI. What is WAPI? WAPI stands for WLAN authentication and Privacy Infrastructure and is the Chinese version of Wi-Fi. Chinese government required handset manufacturers to support WAPI if Wi-Fi is supported on cell phones. In 2009, it was a big issue when Apple iphone planned to enter Chinese market. When China Unicom introduced iphone in China later, iphone has neither Wi-Fi nor WAPI functionality, although it is reported that iphone with Wi-Fi and WAPI will be on the market in 2010.

BTW, what is the difference between WAP and Wi-Fi? Again, Wi-Fi is a data link layer and provides a data highway so that data can be communicated using TCP/IP protocol. In some sense, WAP can be considered as the counterpart of TCP/IP, and GSM/CDMA, which under the WAP, as the counterpart of Wi-Fi.