T-Mobile calls it a day for WAP

UK operator T-Mobile is disconnecting its CSD-WAP subscribers from July 9th, suggesting customers might like to switch to GPRS or something a little more 21st century, and disposing of pay-per-minute internet access. Circuit Switched Data (CSD) was how mobile phones accessed data services in the early days, or at least the …

[Hugh]

They were the days....

I remember I got one of the first WAP enabled phones. The tariff I was on allowed for free internet at the weekend. I loved it..... I miss the waiting.....

[The Serpent]

Good riddance

Always was a load of old cWAP

[Adam]

it's not the speed

its the crappy little screens on mobiles. I, like probably a lot of other people, will quite happily wait until I get home to use a computer with a proper screen to access the internet.

[Anonymous Coward]

AKA

CWAP since it first emerged...

[Twm Davies]

CSD isn't all dead

3G Video calling still uses...oh yeah it's dead.

[Daniel B.]

CSD

Hm... well most PAYG handsets over here were forced to use CSD only, as GPRS was considered "contract only" by the largest operator (Telcel). The cheap-rate operators using CDMA2000, however, switched on their EVDO and beat Telcel to the 3G market, *and* gave it away at a fairly good pricing.

Come March 2008, Telcel finally released 3G in some cities, and 2 weeks ago it finally freed up GPRS/EDGE/3G for PAYG users. But at their extortionate rates, I doubt any PAYG user would want to pony up that kind of cash ... my "test run" ate through my remaining $16 doing a small 2Mb transfer ... which was cut off *because I ran out of credit*.

Guess why mobile internet isn't that big a hit over here...

[Anonymous Coward]

With speeds like that I would fly on VM

I wish i had the wap speeds on my virgin media when I get capped...

[plastical]

Apple.

Apple have not proven anything worth note of anyone with much sense.

They have proven that some specially designed, lo-fi sites created specifically for use on a single screen resolution (which to be fair is quite large) can be usable.

I worked that out 3 years ago.

[Anonymous Coward]

GPRS price

I used to use CSD instead of GPRS due to the fact that the dialup number was included in my free minutes whilst GPRS access was a stupid price.

I never thought WAP was that bad, extremely badly advertised, but it was revolutionary at the time. I remember writing a tool to pull news and things from other websites and build a wap site. I even wrote a WAP site viewer in Visual Basic. Those were the days......

[Bryan B]

WAP worked

Chris is right - CSD did the job, and it was generally cheaper or included. It actually went up to 14.4k (whoo-hoo!) and if your operator did HSCSD, which bonded multiple CSD channels together, it equalled GPRS.

CSD was fine for downloading email (headers plus top kB only, not all the attached junk, but WTF wants that anyway??) and WAP sites.

Plus, if a web designer can't fit their site into a few kB of WAP text, it's almost certainly just unwanted chrome & crap anyway....

There's a lot to be said for CSD batch-style access. Not everything needs to have an always-on GPRS/3G-type connection.

[Andy Tyzack]

virgin media @ 9kb

dear anonymous

i smell bullshit here and its not coming from virgin media

[Stacy Kidd]

Free WAP

My provider allowed free WAP access, which was great. I used to check the train timetable for free, very useful it was too.

[Richard Sloan]

@Bryan B

IIRC the 14.4 service was HSCSD and using bonded channels to get that speed. I was using it on a Journada 540 with an IR link to a 6210 back in the day for mobile internet. GPRS brought it to landline dialup speed, then I got into smartphones. Normal websites were fantastic on my 6600 running Netfront as the browser which rearranged the site to work with the screen when told to. This was usable 3g full web browsing before ipods let alone iphones...