o grow to well over 150 million by the end of 2005. According to a report from the highly influential Gartner Group, in order for 3G to succeed, 50 percent of the population must have access to 75 percent of the offered services, 5 percent of the population must have the most recent devices, and an obvious and widely lauded "killer application" must be evident. Reality rears its ugly head, however: Today, only about 25 percent of United States and Canadian subscribers have access to broadband, while another 20 percent simply cannot get it. This lack of broadband access cannot be allowed to continue: Studies show that widespread broadband access will add hundreds of billions of dollars to the national economy and will add three billion work hours annually-numbers that tend to make regulators and legislators sit up and take notice. Downloaded from Digital Engineering Library @ McGraw-Hill (www.digitalengineeringlibrary.com) Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved. Any use is subject to the Terms of Use as given at the website. Access Technologies Chapter 6 The Wireless Data Conundrum As voice revenues decline through competitive commoditization, wireless carriers are looking for alternative revenue sources that they can turn to. One is wireless data. The first protocol that was announced for data transport over mobile environments was the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP). Originally developed by Phone.com for mobile Internet access, it was largely a dis- appointment among users. Early on in its deployment, Germany's D2 network administrators announced that customers were using it less than a minute a day. The WAP acronym was soon redefined as the "wrong approach to portability" because of the complexity involved in its use (one article reported that it took 32 clicks and scrolls to access a sim- ple stock quote). Many, however, believe that WAP failed because service providers that implemented it were unwilling to share revenues with the content providers that they supposedly partnered wi