Cable & Wireless Optus today celebrated the first birthday of Australia's first Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) service, Optus Networker, releasing a survey (bottom of page) outlining what's hot on WAP.

Finola Thompson, General Manager Mobile Internet & Data, Cable & Wireless Optus said email dominated as the most popular service but news, financial information and lifestyle-oriented services were also highly sought after by Optus WAP users.

"Email is the most popular service on Optus Networker. The convenience of being able to read and send email while you are out and about is obviously a big bonus for our customers," she said.

"Stocks are tops, with Optus Networker users regularly checking on their shares.

"Movie listings are our third most popular service. We see a spike in people checking out what's on at the cinema on Tuesday and Friday nights. During school holidays requests for our movie listing service double," said Ms Thompson.

"Horoscopes are also hot property on WAP with Librans, Piscians and Taurians checking out their stars for the day most often.

"In a bit of a surprise our survey shows that ABC viewers are more techno-savvy than their commercial TV watching counterparts, with program information on Channel 2 being the most requested," she said.

"Location-based services are also popular with over 30 per cent of our WAP users using them since we launched earlier this month."

According to Ms Thompson WAP is continuing to win Australians over and has come a long way since Optus launched it in November last year.

"We have tripled sales of our WAP service in the last three months and we expect this to continue as even more WAP enabled handsets come onto the market," she said.

"We have grown from having only nine content areas when we launched to now having over 52 categories and access to over two million external WAP sites world wide through our open gateway."

Ms Thompson said that Optus has also found that businesses are particularly keen to be part of the mobile data revolution by using WAP to gain access to their customers.

"Over the last six months we have added some major names to our WAP portal including; Westpac, Credit Swiss First Boston, HSBC InvestorDirect, TD Waterhouse, Sanford Securities, start.com.au, ninemsn, Yahoo!, Excite Australia, Wishlist, dstore and Ticketek," she said.

For more information:
Louise Ingram
Cable & Wireless Optus
Tel: 02 9342 5042