Ramachendra P. Batni

Enhanced services in wap-enabled networks

In todays highly competitive wireless marketplace, carriers have to offer user-friendly, innovative services to gain a competitive advantage. Furthermore, subscribers demand services that can be easily customized to their specific needs. The advent of the wireless application protocol (WAP) and WAP-enabled mobile phones is providing an opportunity for carriers to leverage this technology to enrich their service offerings. WAP is becoming the de facto standard for mobile subscribers who want to browse the contents in the Internet and perform e-commerce transactions. At the same time, new capabilities — such as those provided by intelligent network (IN) technology — are also being introduced into the public land mobile networks (PLMNs) to provide enhanced services. This paper discusses how the emerging WAP technology can be synergistically combined with PLMN capabilities to provide mobile subscribers with enhanced converged voice/data services in WAP-enabled wireless networks. To illustrate these concepts, this paper includes several service examples.