Promises may be made to be broken, but if WAP continues failing to deliver on its promises, its devotees could have a new and proven alternative to put their faith in.

Cheap, quick, always on and with a huge range of content, imode may soon threaten the very existence of WAP, as NTT DoCoMo, the Japanese company which provides the service, moves into Europe.

Over the last year, more than seven million Japanese have signed up to i-mode, a wireless Internet service which works via the existing GSM network in Japan.

Its roaring success looks set to continue, with around 500,000 new subscribers to the service every month, and some are predicting that i-mode is set to overtake AOL as the world's leading Internet portal with 18 months.

Recent reports indicated that NTT might be looking for a partner in Ireland and that Enterprise Ireland had brought representatives of the company to Ireland.

I-mode enabled phones could be available in Ireland as early as Christmas. I-mode uses more advanced technology - 2.5 generation - than is being used in Europe and offers everything from interactive gaming and video and audio streaming to location-based services and airline schedules.

A major strength of the system is that subscribers can buy items on their mobile without a credit card. The purchases are merely added to the person's normal mobile phone bill.

Rather than using WAP, which uses the new Wireless Markup Language (WML), NTT DoCoMo decided to opt for something that would be more compatible with the present language of the Internet.

Mr Keiichi Enoke, general manager of gateway department of NTT DoCoMo, said: "We decided to use HTML for the contents of the i-mode service because all home pages in the world are written in HTML, and to utilise the existing content is important."

With more than 7,000 content providers, i-mode offers users everything from fortune telling and games to instant messaging via the Internet.

LCD screens on i-mode handsets provide an interface for surfing the Net.

The service is cheaper than any equivalent access as well, with customers being charged not for the time they are connected but for the amount of data they download.

Industry sources said mobile telecommunications companies in Ireland were attempting to build a walled garden here by refusing to accept content from independent operators for WAP.

DoCoMo, on the other hand, has embraced an open approach to content providers in Japan, and succeeded with a huge range of services through i-mode handsets, giving a compelling example of the actual potential of the wireless Internet.

Mr Barry Nolan, vice president for marketing at Parthus Technologies, said the success of imode was due both to its open attitude to providers and to its targeting of the youth market.

He said that 52 per cent of the data downloaded by i-mode users was entertainment content, and that DoCoMo's objective was to make the i-mode pervasive in a new generation's lives.

Transactions such as transfers, bill querys, stock trades and hotel and airline ticketing make up 21 per cent of traffic.

News and information and database information such as recipes, restaurant guides and city information make up 14 and 13 per cent of traffic respectively.

DoCoMo recently spent £1.2 billion sterling (€1.9 billion) for a 20 per cent stake in Hutchinson 3G UK Holdings, which owns a British third-generation UMTS licence with Canada's Telesystem International Wireless.

The company said it hoped to use that as a platform to spread the use of its popular i-mode and make Japanese W-CDMA technology the world's de facto cell phone standard.

Now the Japanese tidal wave is set to hit Europe with DoCoMo, in conjunction with KPN Mobile NV and Hong Kong's Hutchinson Whampoa, setting up a joint venture to pursue third-generation wireless opportunities in France, Germany and Belgium.

With the constant rumblings of discontent in the industry about the performance of the first generation of WAP mobile phones, there could be the space for imode to repeat its success here.

DoCoMo, with its more advanced technology, has the opportunity to blow away some of the cobwebs currently clogging the development of "the Internet in your pocket" that WAP has promised but never produced.

Mr Nolan said that if DoCoMo did make a push into Europe with i-mode they would make a major impact.

Many European operators have formed alliances with Japanese telecommunications companies to get access to the more advanced technology which they have developed.

The distance that most European operators are from introducing third-generation services and the lack of any similar service to imode in Europe obviously gives i-mode an opportunity.

There is disagreement, however, over whether or not i-mode could be deployed easily in Europe.

Although some commentators said that it was similar to a flavour of GPRS, and a little alteration would make it work on the European GSM network, others disagreed.

Mr Pat O'Connell, business solutions manager with Esat Digifone, said that i-mode would be unable to work on the current GSM network.

He said that by the time DoCoMo had made the necessary alterations, with the large investment and time involved in altering a mobile network for i-mode, current operators would have higher speeds available anyway.

He believed that DoCoMo would probably wait for the introduction of EDGE in a year's time, with its higher speeds, before it would introduce i-mode.

Mr O'Connell said that mobile phone companies were forming alliances across continents because of the enormous costs involved in deployment for third-generation wireless technology.

Through such alliances, he said, European companies would have access to the more advanced knowledge of Japanese mobile communications technology.

Esat was not worried about the impending threat of i-mode, he added.

Mr O'Connell believes that the Japanese experience with i-mode may be a preview for what will happen in Ireland with the advent of GPRS and EDGE technologies.

Although telecommunications operators here seem unworried by the arrival of DoCoMo and imode, if services and speeds do not improve, WAP could be found floating face down in the turbulent waters of a rapidly changing industry.