How Cell Phones Access the Internet

The main way cellular telephones access the Internet is through a protocol called the Wireless Access Protocol (WAP) and its associated markup language, the Wireless Markup Language (WML). To use WAP to access a web page with a cellular telephone, you first need to make a cellular phone call. When you dial a cell phone, it looks for the nearest cellular antenna, called a base station, to transmit the call. The phone scans nearby base stations and locks on one that is either the closest or has the most powerful signal.