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Your Turn:
SMS and WAP: complements, not competitors

by dave mercer
November/December 2001

As services based on WAP continue to fall short of general user expectations, the wireless industry has been scrambling to find an alternative that does not carry WAP's usability issues. Many industry experts have begun looking seriously at short messaging service as a possible candidate.

Although SMS is well suited for many of the services currently being deployed over WAP, SMS will not replace WAP. WAP and SMS are not competitors, but complements.  Some wireless data services are better suited for the quick, convenient access offered by two-way SMS and others for the longer, more in-depth sessions offered by WAP. For example, a traffic or weather report could be handled through pure SMS, while browsing for a restaurant in an unfamiliar city may be better suited to WAP. The deployment of mobile services over a seamless combination of the two technologies is commonly overlooked as an alternative to WAP.

Until recently, wireless carrier networks in North America were only capable of handling one-way SMS. Now, two-way SMS is becoming more commonplace in the United States. AT&T Wireless, Verizon Wireless and several others have launched two-way SMS services in the past several months. Two-way SMS complements the asynchronous transfer of information offered by one-way SMS, allowing users to request that specific information and services be delivered to them on demand. All of this is done without setting up a call or data connection and without having to navigate complicated pages.

Many of the services currently delivered over WAP can be deployed in a similar fashion over SMS, a fact that has led many to predict that the success of two-way SMS would result in the demise of WAP. SMS holds the potential to quickly and easily connect users to WAP-based services, providing a much-needed on-ramp to the vast amount of services and information currently available through a WAP browser. Used in this manner, SMS has great potential to serve as a catalyst for more widespread adoption and usage of WAP-based services.

"WAP-push," for example, allows a formatted message containing embedded links to WAP pages to be delivered to a handset via SMS. Subscribers can view the SMS message and click on an embedded link, automatically initiating a WAP session and taking the user directly to pages containing additional information, thus streamlining the WAP session and increasing usability.

Wireless carriers in North America have been enthusiastic about the revenue opportunities presented by services delivered via a combination of WAP and SMS.  

Carriers are confident that once they overcome the usability issues associated with initiating a data session over a mobile device, their subscribers will spend more time using mobile information services.

Still, no one technology will form the basis for mobile data services. In the near future, users will access a wide range of services that leverage a combination of wireless technologies that today are often viewed as separate and competitive. To be successful, companies must look closely at the core competencies of these technologies and use them together in creative ways, each building off the strengths of the others, in order to offer a better overall user experience.  

Dave Mercer is chief SMS architect at InfoSpace, where he works on integrating InfoSpace applications with SMS. He also works on sales and deployment issues with a number of European carriers.