Learning the lessons of WAP

End users, whether businesses or individual consumers, are suspicious of over-zealous marketing.

One example - WAP. Two years ago, the operators and infrastructure suppliers about to make it a reality were promising great things. But WAP, as we know it now, is a big disappointment.

This can't be allowed to happen again.

At this week's UMTS2000 Congress, the great and good of the information and communications technologies worlds have been talking up UMTS, the version of third-generation mobile technology to be used in Europe. And with good reason.

Ovum forecasts globally there'll be 1.5 billion mobile subscribers by 2006, while the Yankee Group reckons the 84 per cent of western Europeans with mobiles in 2005 will generate $190bn in revenues.

Mobile data will be a big part of that market, made easier by upgrades to GSM and eventually full 3G. However, getting the rollout right will be tricky.

The companies that supply the operators know that. That's why they're falling over themselves to line up content partners, open platforms, location-based options and the like.

It looks certain there'll be no killer app. Nokia speaks about "providing a killer cocktail of services" and rival Motorola is unsurprisingly emphasising "killer architecture".

Branding will be important. BT Cellnet began offering businesses a type of packet-based, faster mobile service, based on a technology called GPRS, in the summer. But the words GPRS, or maybe even BT and Cellnet, might not be anywhere in a service aimed at consumers.

In that respect, Japan has led the way. Companies such as KDDI and especially NTT DoCoMo with its i-Mode service have marketed heavily and now have millions of mobile data users.

At the UMTS2000 Congress, most realise UMTS - and the evolving mobile internet in general - has to appeal to the mass market from the beginning.

If it does, the riches are there for all. But if the rollout is below par, we know how bad it could be. We have WAP.