Mobile industry launches new salvo against OTT players

The mobile industry has launched a major initiative to take back control of the application development area. The initiative, launched at a high profile event at this year's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last week, features an initiative called, WAC, or wholesale application community.

According to Michael O'Hara, chief marketing officer of the WAC initiative, WAC establishes an industry wide standard for operators to support the development of applications and services on their network.

While he stopped short of tagging WAC as a direct reaction by the mobile industry against over-the-top players – i.e. Apple and Google, he did acknowledge that WAC will now enable mobile operators to become much more relevant in the development and deployment of applications and services on their net-works.

WAC is a specification based on a HTML runtime environment and includes specific mobile extensions that allow applications to hook into network services, such as presence, messaging and so on.

The mobile community, including representatives from Telefonica, Vodafone, AT&T, China Mobile, Ericsson and others, officially announced the availability of WAC 1.0, which is still based on HTML4 using a widget-based deployment environment. WAC 2.0, to be launched next year, will feature full HTML5 compliance while WAC 3.0, currently under development, will hook WAC into network APIs inside mobile networks.