The latest joke doing the rounds in tech industry circles is that the three letter acronym, WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) actually stands for Where Are the Phones?. Its origin lies in the somewhat disappointing reality of the hugely hyped WAP-enabled mobile phones, which were by all accounts going to change the way we lived, shopped, parted our hair . . .

WAP phones promised technology capable of putting a Web browser inside any compatible mobile phone. The potential was limitless, until we realised it was practically impossible to do anything constructive with a WAP phone, other than receive news, sport and lottery information. The constraints of the wireless standard GSM platform were too great for the complexity of applications WAP is capable of delivering.

WAP is still in version one, which anyone who has ever spent 10 minutes in a vaguely technical environment knows is code for truly flaky. Take the Nokia 7110, the standard issue WAP phone in Ireland. To say it was launched with some bugs included is to say the Titanic ran into difficulties on its maiden voyage.

Nevertheless, once the mobile equipment providers started the hyperbole rolling, mobile operators throughout Europe invested huge sums to roll out WAP services. The result - thousands of short-changed consumers and equally disillusioned mobile operators, who have learned one valuable lesson from the experience - never again to invest in a mobile data platform that is not supported by adequate subscriber equipment.

So what can we look forward to to get us out of all this mess? The implementation of General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) networks, the coming data standard for the next generation of mobile phones. I know you thought we already had a standard, but this is a new souped up version that means your phone is always hooked up to the Internet. Instead of the customer being charged by the second, you're charged per chunk of data you download.

The network is made more efficient by transmitting data about the place in neat little packets. As a result e-mail will arrive to your phone without having to log on, and GPRS promises much faster data access.

Two caveats. You'll have to buy a new phone to avail of the GPRS service. So even if you're the proud owner of a completely useless WAP phone, to really avail of what WAP has to offer you will have to upgrade to a GPRS version. It's around about this point any sympathy for the mobile operators begins to wane.

Secondly and more importantly, early practical trial speeds of GPRS are proving slower than originally anticipated. BT Cellnet, the first mobile operator to offer it in Britain, originally predicted GPRS would deliver land-line modem speeds - typically 56 kilobits per second (kbps) - to the mobile user.

This is now looking more like 27 kbps. Although this is a definite improvement - three times the current speed of mobiles - it is still only half that of the average less-than-lightning-speed home connection. It transpires consumers are going to have to wait until Christmas and possibly early next year before they can avail of a meaningful GPRS service.

In the Republic, Eircell says that, unlike other local operators, it envisaged early problems achieving high speed GPRS rates, and that is why it chose to bridge the transfer from GSM to GPRS by introducing its "high-speed circuit switched data" (HSCSD) service earlier this year.

According to an Eircell spokeswoman: "Typically our customers are experiencing speeds of 28.8 kbps now and can expect this to rise to 43.2 kbps by yearend. At that stage we anticipate we will be offering a GPRS service that will at least match the speeds of our HSCSD service.

"Eircell will apply the technical knowledge and customer experience gleaned from our HSCSD services to our GPRS service and believe we will be delivering speeds of 40 kbps or 50 kbps by the end of 2000 and 115 kbps by mid-2001."

So we are now looking at a landscape where the promised GPRS speeds of land-line modems has been delayed until next year. Eircell says HSCSD will not become obsolete once GPRS is introduced to consumers, because, depending on the mobile application, it can be more useful than GPRS.

According to the spokeswoman, Eircell will be offering GPRS phones capable of simultaneously handling HSCSD by the autumn. These include the Ericsson 520, and the Motorola Panther phones. Eircell says it intends to offer attractive deals to customers wishing to transfer to the upgraded models.

East Digifone's corporate solutions manager Mr Pat O'Connell, says the telecommunications industry will approve agreed GPRS standards for mobile handsets in August. Consumers can then look forward to differing "flavours" of GPRS, depending on how much of the mobile network can be availed of for the service.

Esat Digifone is spending £32 million on GPRS, which it is developing with Nortel Networks. It says it will also offer its GPRS service by the end of this year and introduce handsets capable of handling speeds of 40 kbps. Within six months, it sees this increasing to 115 kbps.

"Realistically the network and speed are all very well, but people need applications to run over them and it's going to take six to nine months for a variety of software applications useful to the consumer to arrive on the market," says Mr O'Connell.

BT has postponed the retail launch of its GPRS mobile phones until December 2000 in order to gain higher retail sales for Christmas. According to BT it wants to fine-tune its offering. Vodafone also aims to launch its GPRS phones later in 2000, and has not ruled out Christmas 2000 as a likely date.

So we can rest assured mobile equipment providers won't go hungry this Christmas.

Meanwhile, the telecommunications industry is really preparing itself for two next generation wireless standards within the next five years. Bluetooth is a replacement for Infra Red which does not require line of sight and will allow a phone to connect to any simple device as long as it features a chip capable of communicating back. Meaningful applications of the technology will not be commercially available until early next year.

Then there's the third-generation (3G) standard, which will replace GSM within the next five years, called UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System). UMTS promises data transmission of 384 kbps in its early version and two megabits per second soon after.

The 3G standard will allow users to roam worldwide with a single, dual-mode handset and avail of some of the applications currently confined to the characters in sci-fi movies.

The Office of the Director of Telecommunications Regulation has yet to arrive at a decision on how licences for the third generation standard will be allocated in the Republic, but on the back of the bonanza for the British exchequer in its auction of five third generation licences, competition is likely to be fierce.