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RSS feedsWap was soon dubbed crap. Now we are seeing the same thing happen with GPRS.
Wap was absurdly over-hyped by BT Cellnet, with the promise of internet on the move. It was no such thing. Wap text pages crawled onto the screen, setup was nigh impossible without assistance, and the BT Genie helpline charged 50p a minute for no useful help.
I repeatedly asked Cellnet's head man, Peter Erskine, whether he had ever actually tried using what he was selling. He never replied.
BT, £30 billion in debt and golden-handshaking the bosses who made the mistakes, has a track record of launching flawed IT products because the directors and managers have always considered themselves too grand to get their hands dirty.
Instead, they stand up in front of press and City analysts to push buttons on systems set up earlier by boffins from BT's labs. Remember Telecom Gold, Phone Disc, Phonebase, Electronic Yellow Pages, CT2 phones, BT Internet, ISDN Highway and DECT Airway?
Anyone seeking help, or complaining, gets what insiders call the BT Shunt - they get the runaround until they give up.
The Phone Disc CD-ROM should have been a winner but initially cost over £2000 and would not recognise an ampersand in a search address. BT progressively cut the price but by then had lost the market - and the 192 web address - to UKInfo.
True to form, BT had to rush in first with GPRS, the General Packet Radio Service, which puts mobile phone data in labelled packets, pools packets from different users and slots them into several channels.
The official launch was a disaster because it relied on a local closed system, not a real network, and the phones would not connect.
The Motorola Timeport I borrowed promised Internet Access on the menu screen but would not connect to the real network. It had been sent out without being set up for use.
Here's what consumers have to do: go to Menu, Internet Access, OK, and then hold down the Menu button before it has a chance to try and connect.
Go to Browser, Option 7, Setup. Select GPRS WAP, Edit, Data Bearer, GPRS Edit, and go to Option 2, User Name. Enter the word 'geniewap'. Then enter the default password, which is likely to be the word 'password'. Now escape, using the button on the side of the Timeport. Then you are ready to use it with Menu, Access Internet, and Select to get the main Genie Wap portal menu.
When Motorola demonstrated the wonders of GPRS - again with a closed system, not a real network - we were shown how the Timeport connects to a laptop. But the CD-ROM software needed is not yet available, for either the Cellnet or Vodafone GPRS networks.
A Motorola suit cheerfully parrots: "The GPRS Wizard is not needed to establish GPRS data sessions from a laptop or other computer connected to the phone. Any terminal program (e.g. Hyperterminal) can be used to establish GPRS data sessions via AT commands."
Small wonder then that Nokia, world leader in mobile phones, has said "no" to GPRS. Nokia's new, sexy Communicator uses HSCSD instead, even though Orange is the only UK network offering the service and it looked like a blind alley.
HSCSD (High Speed Circuit Switched Data) gangs two or three ordinary GSM channels together and combines their error correction to give 14.4Kbits/sec per channel, and a total speed of 28.8Kbits/sec (43.2Kbits/sec in Ireland).
The Communicator opens like a clamshell to reveal a colour screen and keyboard, can access HTML websites, display graphics, download audio and video and connect to a laptop. It can also work with GSM if there is no HSCSD service available.
GPRS service operators charge around 2p per kilobyte of data moved, which is equivalent to a short Wap page or 40-word email with headers. Orange charges 25p per minute for HSCSD.
"GPRS is slow like the internet on a Sunday afternoon, and it can be costly to receive junk email and spam," warned Mark Squires, Nokia's business development manager. "With HSCSD, it's quicker and cheaper to get rid of it."
HSCSD, then, looks like the superior technology. It's cheaper and, if you want to use it with a notebook, much faster.
Nokia's almost exclusive support for its own technology, not HSCSD, on its new data phones will help, but it looks as though we may be committed to a split standard or a less preferable alternative.
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