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by Answerbag Staff on October 10th, 2003

Answerbag Staff

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What is WAP?

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  • by Christopher Woods on August 30th, 2006

    Christopher Woods

    To follow up from BuckyF's excellent answer, WAP is also sometimes described as one of the services provisioned as part of the '2G' suite of technologies. GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) is sometimes described as '2.5G' (or part of the '2.5G' standard), which instead of only supporting custom-designed WML pages, allows anybody with a phone which supports it (and can render web pages on the device) to browse the Internet proper, directly on their mobile device - but it's not cheap, with bandwidth costing many people several £ (GBP) per megabyte. For instance, O2 in the UK charges me £2.35 for 1 megabyte of bandwidth after my initial (pitiful) free allowance.

    Xilinx.com describes GPRS as,

    "A GSM data transmission technique that does not set up a continuous channel from a portable terminal for the transmission and reception of data, but transmits and receives data in packets. It makes very efficient use of available radio spectrum."

    In the UK, devices running the Blackberry software use an always-on GPRS connection in combination with a custom tariff from the network service provider to transmit and receive data on the go.

    The much-hyped 3G data transmission technique, which is designed to supercede GPRS, allows for much higher data rates (measured in mbps as opposed to GPRS's several hundred kbps maximum), and therefore allowing for realtime video (video calls), faster downloads and richer content for users.

    keep-talking.net sums up the progression of technologies quite neatly, including the current crop of 3G services (Europe and the UK has one set of standards, Asia has its own and America stands alone with its own standards)...

    "Third-generation mobile telecommunications system. Three different 3G systems are currently being defined: UMTS by ETSI; J-FPLMTS by ARIB in Japan; and different systems by the TIA. The first generation was analog cellular such as NMT, AMPS, TACS; second generation cellular systems are digital such as NADC, GSM, PDC, CDMA."

    http://www.keep-talking.net/glossary.htm

    If you want to read more and find out about any particular technologies in any depth, I suggest you begin by Googling (sorry, 'searching for', as Google is trying to dissuade people from using the verb 'to Google') some of those acronyms. Happy 'searching for' :)

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