The figures from MDA show a steady growth in mobile internet use. In early 2003, about 500,000 pages were visited each month while in March this year the number of WAP page impressions reached more than 1.8 billion.
Michael Short, MDA chairman, says there are several reasons for the growing popularity of WAP browsing. "Initially, there was a lack of interesting sites for users to visit," he says. "The penetration of WAP-capable handsets was also low and the services were not promoted that much. Today, this has notably changed. There are a lot of services, there are increasingly more handsets that handle WAP 2.0, and the services are promoted on the internet and TV."
Other contributing factors are increased availability of GPRS and 3G technologies and improved handset reliability.
For the moment, development is so fast it is hard to keep up with. In 2004, MDA counted 14.6 billion WAP impressions, for 2005, the forecast has been revised from 15.5 billion to about 18 billion.
"We made the forecast in October last year, but in the last six months WAP usage has accelerated so much we have already had to revise the outlook," Short says. "For example, last December the traffic was 23 percent higher than the year before and in March the increase was 30 percent, compared to one year before," he says.
Operator portals are dominating browsing, but Short sees a shift. "There is a trend of traffic moving towards independent portals in mature markets," he says.
MDA was founded in 1994 to promote mobile data services. Today, the organization has 92 members including operators, vendors and application developers.
Read more at www.mda-mobiledata.org
