US wireless analyst Peter Friedland (Hambrecht & Co.) already reported that
AT&T Wireless unofficially confirmed that it would go with a WAP
infrastructure for i-mode courtesy of Openwave:
"Although not officially announced in a press release, Openwave noted that
AT&T Wireless plans to use Openwave for 2.5G and 3G mobile Internet
infrastructure. We believe this is significant given that in November 2000,
AT&T Wireless announced a partnership with NTT DoCoMo to deploy i-mode
services in the United States. At the time, the announcement raised concerns
that AT&T Wireless would replace Openwave's WAP gateways with DoCoMo's
i-mode technology. Under Openwave's agreement with AT&T Wireless, Openwave
will supply 2.5G and 3G mobile Internet infrastructure services that will
support both WAP and i-mode technology."
http://www.wrhambrecht.com/research/coverage/wireless/ir/ir20010202.pdf
Since both the Openwave and Access (as well as other makers') browsers will
support cHTML, xHTML, and WML (2.0) as of this fall, there is no technology
block to AT&T Wireless launching i-mode-branded services on a WAP
infrastructure.
Since AT&T has also separately announced that it was building a GSM/GPRS
network to support i-mode (and follow the GSM/GPRS-->W-CDMA migration path
to DCM's delight...), it appears that we will indeed see "i-mode on WAP."
And do you know what? Who cares!? i-mode always has been a brand name and a
biz model while WAP was/is a technology (or set of technologies). It should
come as no more of a surprise that i-mode can be provided via WAP than it
should be that i-mode can be provided via TCP/IP (or, in DoCoMo's case, TLP)
on HTTP -- and the underlying bearer network (so long as it's
packet-switched) makes no difference.
--Daniel
[ Did you check the archives? http://www.appelsiini.net/keitai-l/ ]
Received on Wed Jun 13 09:00:17 2001