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Is WAP really considered a failure? Or just a transitional technology for an era of low-powered mobile devices? I downloaded my fair share of games and ringtones from "wap dot" sites.

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Similar for ISDN. At least over here it was a successful and important solution for many people, not only for data access, but it was als the way to get multiple lines, caller id, etc. activated.

Of course DSL and other techs took over, but it was far from a failure.

Maybe Germany is an outlier, but ISDN for telephony (less for internet) was still huge until.. I dunno, 2010? 2015? That's nearly 15 years of being the default solution for smaller companies. (and also bigger ones, and also private households)

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