Over the last couple of weeks I’ve met some prospective customers from the Telecom domain here in India. While they’re all keyed about mobile learning, they have serious reservations about how they (as telecom service providers) can leverage their own networks. I often point to some simple facts. Each of their employees carries a cell phone and is connected to the network 24 hours a day. These employees are scattered all over the Indian geography. This presents a unique challenge and opportunity.

The challenge obviously is the delivery of any sort of training intervention using mobile phones. The limitations imposed by screen size and capability, plus in the Indian context having to support a wide variety of languages and scripts. The opportunity is clearly in the ubiquity of the devices amongst the employee base and ownership of the network and the technology for content delivery. An easy solution to propose is the use of installable applications or browser based content access; however it doesn’t account for the largest singular reason such solution fail in India – 90%+ phones do not support GPRS data connectivity or lack a HTML standard compliant browser.

While this may seem strange to someone from the west, it’s well known in India that the bulk of the phones are cheap and basic –phones such as these an do not features operating systems capable of handling installable, or a fully featured browser. These are the phones that are selling in millions and are the ones that provide most of the voice and SMS traffic on the network.

However there is a technology that has existed for more than a decade, that provides a perfect fit for these innumerable basic phones – it’s WAP Wireless Application Protocol. There are three primary reasons :