So, WAP isn't Crap After All

According to the BMRB Internet Monitor 49% of 20 - 24 year olds in the UK have used the internet on their mobiles and 21% of all users have bitten the bullet.

This is pretty amazing considering:

- Many, many phones still come with the wrong settings. This means that the purchaser either has to change them or just give up at that point. Be very afraid if the head of engineering at an operator ever switches career and starts designing cars - you'll be expected to put the wheels on yourself.

- WAP marketing promised the earth, such that even a broadband type of speed and experience would have been a little disappointing. The sloooooow speeds and painful waiting around was just awful.

- Even now, there's actually surprisingly little content that looks good and is easy-to-use over WAP. The vast majority on web pages aren't optimised.

Now admittedly the survey is only looking at sampling - in other words, users may well have tried it, only to die of boredom during the process. However, the Mobile Data Association shows around 1.8 billion page impressions a month now and this is still growing at abut 24% year on year, so clearly many are finding the service useful enough.

With 3G speeds, the mobile internet is not only going to get better, but it'll really start to resemble a small screen version of a broadband connected computer. At that point, someone of any age will be unusual if they didn't use the mobile internet.

The way this scenario will eventually play out is that the mobile will become the primary way most of us access the net and I think this'll happen within 5 years.

Via The Big Picture

Comments

[Jonathan Grubb]

Those of us in the Wap product field have known this for years - wap usage has shown steady growth since the day it launched.

The only place I disagree with your post is the timeline. By some measures there are already more mobile internet users than PC internet users. I predict that desktop usage will be clearly surpassed by mobile usage within the next 2 years.

[Troy Norcross]

Nice one Russell.

1.8B WAP page impressions - great news! - And how many ringtones and screen savers are downloaded each month - with each one requiring anywhere from 1-3 page impressions.

My point - if you take out use of WAP to download content you are left with the number of "surfing" page impressions and then I think you'll see a slightly different result.

The big driver for WAP surfing traffic has come from Vodafone Live! - Orange World, T-Zones and other operator portals - but still the overall traffic is realtively small.

I'm still not convinced that the mobile will ever be the primary way of accessing the internet in those parts of the world where a PC is a viable alternative.

The guy who REALLY REALLY hates SPAM.