Wireless: Beyond the Hype

Wireless e-commerce is barely a reality in the U.S. and already I''m tired of the hype. In the past two weeks I''ve read some really outrageous (and occasionally irrelevant) statistics from folks in the industry about the growth of wireless e-commerce. My favorite useless statistic was from an article on one of my favorite developer sites. It quoted a vice-president of one of the companies that stands to gain the most from the wireless hoopla. He told the gullible reporter that "research shows" there would be 2 billion wireless phones in use by 2003. Simple math tells us that''s absurd -- 2 out of 5 people in the world, including children, will own wireless phones? Research that I actually can get my hands on puts the number of digital phones (only digital phones matter for purposes of e-commerce) worldwide at closer to 80 million by the same year -- 2003 (Jupiter Communications, July 1999). Dataquest estimates there will be 21.3 million mobile devices sold worldwide by 2003, but doesn''t indicate how many will be Web-enabled, again, the relevant subset. Estimates by Motorola bring the number up closer to 300 million (based on the rate of sales to date), but 2 billion is far beyond what any independent source is estimating.

This column aims to slice through the hype cloud and provide you with enough information so that you can begin implementing the latest technology right away, with enough technical details to know what will be required of you. So if you''re ready to wireless-enable your own Web site, or even your brick-and-mortar store that doesn''t have a Web site, read on.

How Wireless Works
Wireless includes any type of device that can handle two-way real-time communication, such as digital phones, hand-held devices like the Palm VII, and two-way pagers. There are two players that you, as a merchant, need to know about: the service provider, and the wireless data provider. The service provider is the one who owns the wireless network, such as Sprint PCS. As a result they own and control the gateway and dictate what shows up on default home page of each phone. Generally speaking, the goal is to become a menu item. In order to be a menu item on Sprint PCS phones, you have to negotiate with Sprint for the space (and pay them a lot of money). For each network, you have to go through the negotiations anew.

MobileShift, one of the wireless data providers listed in the resources section at the end of this article, has a patent-pending process that will make menu items irrelevant or at least give customers access to their site without being on the menu and without typing.

If you wanted to fly solo into the wireless arena, skipping the wireless data provider, you''d have to negotiate with each of the service providers for each wireless network - Sprint PCS, GTE, etc. Then you''d have to write the engine to convert your product data into the format that the service providers could handle. This is where the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) comes in.