WAP support: Fido is a bad dog !

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JF Mezei - 31 Jan 2004 09:53 GMT

I contacted FIDO to find out why their WAP server does not provide a customer
identification tag as do most WAP gateways.

The anwers I got was quite disapointing. They don't provide support for WAP
because they are a supplier of a mobile service. ("nous n'offront pas de
support technique aux clients voulant développer un site WAP puisque nou
sommes un fournisseur de service mobile".

Not sure if I should read total incompetance in the matter, or remnants of the
proprietary disease which started when Fido started to shut down providers
such as Martin Renter's SMS gateway because it wanted monopoly on SMS services.

They then proceed telling me that developping a WAP site is a programming
issue, not a wireless issue. Guess what Fido: WAP is part of your mobile
offering. And if you want your customers to spend GPRS money, you have to make
it easy for people to provide content. A company that is just out of bankrupcy
and has spent the big bucks to install GPRS/WAP facilities should be
maximising its infrastructure's use by fostering more content.

The WAL/WML supplier doesn't cost any money to Microcell, but will generate
revenus to Microcell whenever a microcell customer accesses the site and ups
the kilobyte amounst in his Fido bill.

And if Fido wants to be ahead of its competition, it should foster the
development of smart WAP sites that make the fullest possible use of the
feature set included in the WAP architecture. Right now, the Fido home page is
pathetic. Air Canada's WAP site randomly decides if it can or cannot provide
you with schedule information, the lottery site tells me that the quebec
lotteries don't exist (404, not found) etc etc.

All I want is to be able to make a simple WAP site on my server to allow
access from my own phone to my own data (this involves authenticating a user,
hence my question about the customer identity tags that woudl normally bne
included as part of the HTTP headers).

And I might make available a few ringtones I develop for myself.

Note that networks such as Sprint have PDF documents aimed at WAP content
providers to describe Sprints facilities, and guidelines for designing WAp
sites for sprint customers (for instance, many are still on CSD, so connect
time is an issue).

The Fido response did confirm that they do plan on having WAP-Push and MMS in
the future. (But WAP-Push requires a customer ID tag so that the sending
server can tell the Fido WAP gateway whom to deliver the WML page to).

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Paul Fedorenko - 31 Jan 2004 17:16 GMT

> The anwers I got was quite disapointing. They don't provide support for WAP
> because they are a supplier of a mobile service. ("nous n'offront pas de
> support technique aux clients voulant d?velopper un site WAP puisque nou
> sommes un fournisseur de service mobile".

Does your ISP's tech support department provide HTML tutorials, either on a
web site or over the phone? Mine doesn't, and I wouldn't expect them to,
since it's beyond the scope of the department. Their job is to make sure
customers' email, dial-up and DSL connections work properly and that the
customer is able to make use of the service. Same goes for Fido's Customer
Service. If your phone doesn't work, they can (sort of) help you. If you
want to learn to design sites in WML, you're on your own.

Couple of sites to get you started:

http://www.w3schools.com/wap/

http://www.wirelessdevnet.com/channels/wap/training/wml.html

http://www.softsteel.co.uk/tutorials/wmltut/

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JF Mezei - 01 Feb 2004 01:15 GMT

> Does your ISP's tech support department provide HTML tutorials, either on a
> web site or over the phone? Mine doesn't, and I wouldn't expect them to,
> since it's beyond the scope of the department.

My question was related to Fido's WAP gateway which does not provide some of
the HTTP headers that are normally to be expected according to all the
documentation I have found.

Other networks provide developper resources/documents that descripbe their
network's implementation, especially in those areas whener the particular
network differs from others.

What you don't understand that that the WAP gateway is much more than a simple
proxy machine. When you send a request from your phone to access a page, the
server at the other end gets an HTTP request that is generated by the WAP
gateway, not by your phone and contains many WAP specific headers. For
instance, the Openwave gateway product provides in the HTTP headers the screen
size of the phone so that you can then provide content targetted at the phone
itself. And as part of those extra HTTP headers is some form of unique
identification of the customer.

The goal is to allow the server to authenticate a user based on that reliable
HTTP header, instead of forcing a user to enter a username/password for every
session they begin. The identification is also necesary to push wap content to
the phone.

(For instance, if you register to receive breaking news via WAP, the server
needs to know whom it can send those news to.

SMS sends a trustable "from" (i.e. you phone number). Fido's implementation
of WAP doesn't. The specs call for a unique id for a customer, that ID need
not be a phone number or any identifiable feature.

Note that internally, the FIDO gateway does have that unique ID since it keeps
the cookies for each WAP customer. (WAP phones don't handle cookies, but the
WAP gateway does).

In other words, the traffic between the WAP gateway and the HTTP server is
very different and much more elaborate than the traffic between the WAP
gateway and the handset.

Reply to this Message

Paul Fedorenko - 01 Feb 2004 21:18 GMT

> > Does your ISP's tech support department provide HTML tutorials, either on a
> > web site or over the phone? Mine doesn't, and I wouldn't expect them to,
[quoted text clipped - 3 lines]
> the HTTP headers that are normally to be expected according to all the
> documentation I have found.

Hmmm... Looks like I misunderstood your original post. Sorry about that.
Once I read it again, I realised the general thrust of your complaint. I
thought you were simply looking for WML/WAP tutorials. I guess there's a
benefit to reading a post more carefully. I can definitely see the benefit
to what you're asking for. It's really no different then them shutting down
access to their SMS TAP port a couple years back. Blocked a lot of useful
services, that did.

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Rob Russell - 03 Feb 2004 09:35 GMT

Go Go Gadget JF Mezei <jfmezei.spamnot@istop.com>:

> Note that internally, the FIDO gateway does have that unique ID since it keeps
> the cookies for each WAP customer. (WAP phones don't handle cookies, but the
> WAP gateway does).

So write your page so that once you authenticate once, it sets a cookie
to allow for future authentication.

Signature

Rob.Russell@Canada.Com, Unicorn of Usenet & Bastard of Bandwidth
"If my son wants to be a pimp when he grows up, that's fine with me. I
hope he's a good one and enjoys it and doesn't get caught. I'll support
him in this. But if he wants to be a network administrator, he's out of
the house and not part of my family." Steve Wozniak, http://www.woz.org

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