How Cell Phones Receive Wireless Internet
Cellular telephones access the Internet through the Wireless Access Protocol (WAP), and the markup language that goes along with it – the Wireless Markup Language (WML). In order to use WAP to access a Web page, the cell phone must first make a phone call. When you use a cell phone, it finds the nearest cellular antenna, called a “base station” to transmit the call.
The phone asks for permission to make the call. The base station will look at the cell phone’s mechanical serial number and electronic serial number to make sure that the phone can use the cellular network.
The base station sends the call to a telephone-wire-based network (also called a landline), and then to a network server and WAP gateway (A gateway is a device that connects Local Area Networks with each other and can translate data from one network to another). The gateway then sends a request for the Web page to the Web server which the page is on. The page is then sent back to the WAP gateway.
If the page is in HTML format, the gateway reformats the page in WML so that it can be read by your cell phone. The WML page is sent through the landline to a base station, which then sends the page to your cell phone where it can be read. However, not all cell phones will be able to properly display graphics, so some Web pages may be displayed improperly, even if they are in WML format.