W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). An industry consortium which seeks to promote standards for the evolution of the Web and interoperability between WWW products by producing specifications and reference software. Although W3C is funded by industrial members, it is vendor-neutral, and its products are freely available.

WAE (Wireless Application Environment). A general-purpose application environment based on a combination of World Wide Web (WWW) and mobile telephony technologies. WAE’s primary objective is to set-up an interoperable environment that will allow network operators and service providers to build applications and services for different wireless platforms in an efficient and useful manner. It includes a micro-browser environment.

WAN (Wide Area Network). A network which spans a large geographic area relative to the office and campus environment of LAN (Local Area Network). A WAN is characterized by having much greater transfer delays.

WAP (Wireless Application Protocol). An application environment and a set of communication protocols for wireless devices designed to enable manufacturer, vendor, and technology-independent access to both the Internet and advanced telephony services.

WARC: World Administrative Radio Conference. WARC is an international conference held every few years to determine international frequency allocations.

WCDMA: Wideband CDMA. A spread spectrum radio interface technology capable of supporting high data rates for multimedia applications and services.

WDP (Wireless Datagram Protocol). This is the transport layer protocol in the WAP architecture. It offers a consistent service to the upper layer protocols of WAP and communicates transparently over one of the available bearer services.

WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy). A standard for ciphering data frames that provides only minimal privacy.

Wholesale rating contract. An agreement between different network operators about the rating of calls and the settlement of bills when calls are made between the networks by their subscribers. The contract can be implemented through interconnect accounting systems (IAS).

Wideband. A medium capacity communications channel that carries data at speeds between 64 kbps to 1.544 Mbps.

Wi-Fi (Wireless Fidelity). A Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance certification program that ensures equipment claiming 802.11 compliance is genuinely interoperable

Wireless telecommunications. Communicating over long distances using electromagnetic means.

WLAN (Wireless LAN). A LAN in which the air medium forms the common communications link. Communication is by radio waves or infrared light.

WLL (Wireless local loop). A wireless connection between the telecommunications service subscriber and the public switched telephone network (PSTN).

WML (Wireless Markup Language). A tag-based document language that shares its origins with HTML. WML is optimized for presentation and user interaction on limited-capability devices, such as wireless mobile terminals.

WMLScript. A scripting language used to program the handheld wireless devices. It is an extended subset of Javascript.

Workflow management database. A database that contains a record of all necessary information received during the execution of a process by the customer care operator. For example, registering a new subscriber to a network.

WSP (Wireless Session Protocol). Provides the application layer of WAP with a consistent interface for two session services - a connection-oriented service that operates above the transaction layer protocol WTP, and a connectionless service that operates above a secure or non-secure datagram service (WDP).

WTA (Wireless Telephony Application). A collection of telephony specific extensions for call and feature control mechanisms that make advanced mobile network services available to end-users. It essentially merges the features and services of data networks with the services of voice networks.

WTLS (Wireless Transport Layer Security). A security protocol based upon the industry-standard Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol, previously known as Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). It has been optimized for use over narrow-band communication channels and provides data integrity, privacy, and authentication and denial-of-service protection.

WTP (Wireless Transaction Protocol). A light-weight transaction-oriented protocol which operates on top of a datagram service and is suitable for implementation in "thin" clients (mobile stations).

WWW (World Wide Web). All the resources and users on the Internet that are using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).

WWW XHTML. Refers to World Wide Web Extended HTML.