APiON Ltd, the Northern Ireland based WAP Infrastructure provider and Symmetry Communications Inc., the California based GPRS Infrastructure company have co-operated to successfully demonstrate WAP-GPRS interworking.
The use of Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) over General Packet Radio System (GPRS) trials took place between APiON’s BinnianTM WAP gateway situated in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and Symmetry Communications’ GPRS lab in San Jose, California. The WAP/GPRS interworking successfully demonstrated banking, e-mail and entertainment applications on mobile devices.
GPRS provides high speed packet data access to the next generation of GSM mobile handsets. APiON and Symmetry’s successful demonstration of WAP content delivery over GPRS utilizes the air interface more effectively to provide up to 144 kbit/s of data services direct to the mobile handset. The successful interworking shows that the air interface need no longer be a bottleneck in delivering mobile Internet content. This WAP-GPRS interworking is being demonstrated live at Symmetry’s booth (no 838) at the PCS ’99 Show in New Orleans this week.
Symmetry’s GPRS system will be one of the first to be commercially available, being based on a Sun Microsystems SPARCengineTM platform operating in the SolarisTM environment. The use of a “computing” platform makes for high reliability, capacity and throughput, compared with special-to-type “telecoms” hardware, and has greatly shortened the development cycle.
Mr Denis Murphy, APiON’s Managing Director said “APiON is committed to ensuring that our WAP infrastructure products provide the best possible mobile internet solutions for both today and tomorrow. With the roll out of GPRS networks across the world next year, APiON is already preparing to offer our customers WAP capability over this optimal packet switched backbone.”
Mr John Baker, President, Symmetry Communications said “APiON’s WAP software proved to be very simple and straightforward to link through our GPRS system, with complete transparency. GPRS and WAP together demonstrate the end to end capability needed to place powerful network applications at the end user’s fingertips.”
In August 1999, APiON was the first company in the world to commercially launch a gateway product that complies with Version 1.1 of the WAP specification.
Mr Michael Curran, Apion’s Business Development Director said “Working with Symmetry Communications has been hugely productive. Symmetry’s corporate GPRS infrastructure products form part of our shared vision of an internet-enabled mobile corporation.”
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