How the Internet got on the mobile phone

Wireless Application Protocol

In the late 1990s, the mobile phone market was booming and internet usage was at a peak. So people thought about how they could connect the Internet to their cell phones. GPRS or even EDGE were still in their infancy and circuit switched data (CSD) transmission was initially used. Data rate was therefore a dominant problem when using a cell phone. In addition, as mentioned above, a display with sufficient resolution and a keyboard was missing.

For this reason, a special language was developed for mobile phones to replace the complex HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) of the usual websites for mobile phones. This language was the Wireless Markup Language (WML). It was significantly different from HTML because it primarily took into account the fact that a cell phone only had a small amount of RAM in the late 1990s. This meant that data could only be transferred in small packets. Overall, mobile Internet access has a high latency (response speed) compared to “normal Internet connections,” especially in the early days.

The new standard for mobile Internet was called WAP. Wireless Application Protocol. It was standardized in a forum called the WAP Forum. The WAP Forum was founded in 1997 by Nokia, Ericsson and Motorola. At the turn of the century in 2000, WAP came onto the market and was heralded as a major innovation for the mobile communications market. Many useful applications were devised that were intended to “revolutionize” mobile life.

However, WAP became a major flop. European users were used to the performance of the Internet on their PCs and used this as a benchmark when assessing WAP. WAP performed poorly not because the display on the phones was inadequate or the input was too complicated, but because the latency was far too high. This was due to the fact that GPRS was not yet available when WAP was introduced. So a CSD connection had to be established. Such a setup sometimes took up to thirty seconds. Responses to inquiries were also delayed. During all this time the phone was “connected” and the subscriber had to pay per minute for a connection. In addition, there were possible fees from the corresponding internet service provider. WAP was therefore viewed as far too expensive. Soon WAP was nicknamed “Wait and Pay”.

WAP was too slow and too expensive to be successful.

One service that WAP introduced was a multimedia message service MMS. From 2002 onwards, mobile phone subscribers were able to send “postcards” from their devices, which consisted of a photo and a message. Many devices already had simple cameras integrated with which photos could be taken. Compared to today, the quality of the photos was poor and the service was very expensive. It cost more than one euro to send a photo and was therefore hardly used in Germany.

Nevertheless, WAP remained an essential part of the cellular system, but more indirectly. WAP also came with a billing system. If you used a service, for example from an external provider, the costs could be billed via your mobile phone bill. This was both useful and dangerous at the same time. WAP was used, for example, to download and pay for “ringtones”, which became very popular in Europe around 2004, especially among young people.

WAP made it possible to purchase services and SW via the telephone bill.

In the noughties, for example, there was a company called Jamba whose only business model was downloading ringtones. The most famous ringtone was Crazy Frog. Crazy Frog and its variations alone are said to have generated global sales of $400 million. In 2006, 13.2 million ringtones were sold in Germany.

i Mode

A standard comparable to WAP was called i-mode and was developed by the Japanese mobile operator NTT Docomo.

In Japan they operated PDC mobile communications system. PDC (Personal Digital Cellular) was a second generation digital mobile radio and was closely based on IS-54 digital AMPS. It had a relatively narrow channels of 25 kHz and three digital time slots. Like IS-54, it was modulated with pi/4-DQPSK. The channels were in two bands, an 800 MHz band and a 1400 MHz band. A packet based service PDC-P was introduced for PDC early on. In this packet service, three time slots were bundled and had a data rate of up to 28.8 kbit/s.

Like WAP, i-mode did not develop a new representation language for Internet content, but was based heavily on the existing HTML, which it called iHTML. This was a variant of the so-called Compact HTML (cHTML) with some special extensions such as special display symbols or key inputs. The proximity to HTML made it easier for developers to design or redesign pages on the Internet for i-Mode.

i-mode came with special mobile devices. These had an i-mode button that allowed immediately use internet services. In addition, i-mode, which was introduced in 1999, was based on PDC-P from the start, which meant almost immediate access to the internet. There was no need „to dial in like for WAP. Another feature of i-mode was a special i-mode menu that could be easily navigated with just a few “clicks”.

i-mode was a great success from the start in Japan and later in some other Asian countries. In addition to the better usability of i-mode, this also had cultural reasons. Initially, Japan was very reluctant to introduce the Internet in the 1990s. For a long time there were no Internet service providers that allowed access to the Internet. It wasn’t until 1997 that the government allowed more access to the Internet. This was very late compared to Europe or even America.

During this time, NTT Docomo started its mobile Internet project. A curious goal here was that they wanted cell phone users to use them intensively but not to make many calls to avoid network congestions. For many Japanese, i-mode became their first ever internet experience. The Japanese weren’t at home on a PC but much more „on the move“ e.g. in public transportation. Here they just had a cell phone to access the internet and its services.

In its first year, i-mode already had 1 million participants. At the end of 2000 there were already 15 million. Hardly any other technology had such growth rates. The main application was email. Email to other cell phones but also to PCs. However, Japanese emails were very limited in length (250 kanji characters) and were therefore more like an SMS message. There were also games, especially for young people, and melodies and pictures could be downloaded.

An innovation from i-mode were 176 so-called emojis. These were small icons that could be mixed in with the text. These were the forerunners of today’s widespread emojis, but they were very “pixelated” as the screens often only had a resolution of 150 x 100 pixels. It was gimmicks like these that made i-mode so popular, especially among young people.

NTT Docomo tried to establish i-mode outside of Europe but with little success. In the early 2000s, virtually 80% of mobile internet took place in Japan. Even WAP worked more successfully in conjunction with GPRS in Japan than in Europe. In the first decade of the new century, Japan became the most advanced nation in the production and use of mobile phones.

The success of mobile Internet in Japan was also due to the culture of living together in small spaces. For example, it was frowned upon to talk loudly on trains or even to use a cell phone. E-mail and chat services fulfilled the Japanese people’s need to communicate in public. In Japan, it became common to see young people who always had a cell phone (a Keitai) in their hand looking for news.