Mobile News

The WAP push technology framework is based on a push gateway that is able to deliver the push message from the initiator to all subscribers registered as receivers. There are two types of push message, depending on their content type:

* service initiator (SI), service loading (SL) and cache operation (CO). SI only sends an alert indicating that data in the form of a WML document is available for downloading from a web server, for example. SL, on the other hand, may interrupt other activities and force the handset to fetch a message automatically from the assigned server and display it on the browser. CO messages are used to invalidate content previously cached by the mobile handset

* multipart message containing different content types. This contains a set of headers and an ordered list of content parts. Each part in turn consists of (1) a set of headers that apply to that part and (2) its content. This type of message improves the user experience by preloading all content and thus avoiding network latencies per content part.

From a mobile marketing perspective, the service provider must either have access to a push proxy gateway (PPG) or be able to directly encode WAP push messages for sending over SMS, which is less convenient, but does not require a PPG. The receiving handset must have a browser capable of interpreting the various content types, which is not the case for handsets available today on the market. For an SI message, the number of SMS messages required varies according to the length of the URI and the text to be displayed.