A "gateway" is the physical piece of hardware that connects a WAP device to the computer that holds the data to look at. A "service provider" is the organisation that runs the gateway. These two concepts are not the same thing but can be seen as part of the same phenomenon: the public don’t connect to a WML deck directly, they go through a middleman.
In theory no, in practice yes. One problem with WAP is that the general public don’t really want to bother themselves with complex attachment procedures. Now when a WAP phone is sold it’s usually got a service provider’s details pre-entered on it (think of a radio with the stations preset). These details are long and complicated (involving things like speed of data transmission, whether it’s a data/analogue signal, and so on) and people don’t really want the fuss of having to enter a new set of details. So they tend to go with the service provider that comes with the phone, and that is inevitably a middleman like One2One, Ericsson, Vizzavi, Mvavi and so on
In theory no, in practice yes. Another big problem with WAP, and again one that is becoming increasingly obvious, is that it’s too difficult to enter a URL on a phone! It’s entirely possible for a member of the general public to type in the address of a WML page, but the limited number of keys on a mobile render this a long and complex procedure. It’s made even worse when characters like ".", ":" and "/" are considered: on a normal keyboard these characters are childishly easy to input, but on a mobile phone keypad they are prohibitively difficult. And as for the"~"….! So the only people who will connect directly to a page are the people who are skilled in WAP/WML and have the time and incentive to do so. And the only people willing to do that are the middlemen.
In short, to get anybody to connect to a site, they will have to go via a middleman. The public have neither the inclination nor the capacity to connect directly to a given site, so they can’t be charged direct. This is the biggest single problem affecting the commercial development of WAP and may in fact result in its failure.
Theodore Judlin pointed out that "if the middlemen are the people with the money" (because they charge the users to access their sites) "then the middlemen are the people that a site should be sold to". In short, the middlemen are the customers, not the general public and it shouldn’t be too difficult to make a deal where they link to a site in return for money. This is not an optimum solution since one would be forced to deal with middlemen rather than the public, and cartel conditions would prevail. However, it remains the only feasible solution at the present time.
To recap; ultimately, the problem is that the general public just can’t work WAP effectively. WAP is long and complex, the buttons are fiddly, the details are complex and the public just can’t cope with it. That’s why the middlemen are in such a cartel position , standing directly between the users and the site designers. So how can this bottleneck be negotiated? Well, one possibility is to start thinking "phone call" rather than "data connection"...
OK, a quick bit of explanation is needed here. When you make a WAP connection your phone is in "data mode". When your phone is in "data mode" it’s acting like a very small computer attaching itself to the Internet via a modem, and it needs lots of fiddly details like data speed, IP address, whether it’s a digital/analogue signal, so on and so forth. This is different to "phone mode" when all the user needs to do is tap in the phone number. This distinction is crucial because people know how to work their phones in "phone mode" (they just dial the number) but can’t really cope when the phone’s in "data mode" ("Hmmm, what does ‘data speed’ mean?"). Problem is, the phone has to be in "data mode" in order to make a WAP connection, so this problem is insuperable, right?
Perhaps not…
Imagine this scenario. You make a conventional phone call from your mobile phone – not a WAP connection, just an ordinary phone call. At the other end of the phone line there is a computer. The computer either takes control of the phone or tells the user what to do, but either way the computer manages to switch the phone from "phone mode" to "data mode", and the WAP connection proceeds as normal. At this point you’ve made the connection for the user, cut out the middleman entirely and your WML page suddenly becomes commercially viable.
At this time is is unknown whether this solution would work. Well, on the face of it, no, since a phone in "data mode" is very different from when it’s in "phone mode", and it may not be possible to switch them remotely. The lack of standardisation of mobile phones and WML browsers would also seem to militate against it. However, there are tantalisingly vague suggestions that this may be possible – for example, you can download ring tones to your telephone, and this may be a crude example.
If this can be made to work, then WAP will have a commercially viable future. If it can’t, then WAP will join 8-track stereo and Betamax videos in the long list of things that were technically superior but too complicated for commercial success. It would be a good idea for somebody to look into this, and the author regrets the fact that the demands of this thesis meant that it wasn’t him.