WAP access problem circumvented

Thought I'd relay my experiences trying to set up a simple WML page on
my website. Warning the following is boring, but this is really so I
can get my complaint public and give some outlet to my frustration
with Soul, my mobile service provider, whose customer service sucks,
and maybe Optus, whose systems may be responsible for the difficulties
I had. The simple difficulty of trying to connect one's mobile phone
to WAP, combined with the closed nature of mobile systems making it
very difficult to figure out what's going wrong, surely makes the
whole idea of internet functional mobile phones less accessible and
popular than what they might be.

So... I originally uploaded a simple test page to my site. Now to
visit it through my phone...I've never used WAP before on my current
connection and of course it doesn't work by default, just says "GPRS
failed". OK so I check out the settings on my phone, the Sony Ericsson
T310, it has all sorts of Data Accounts, WAP profiles, GSM network
settings, Preferred Services (GSM or GPRS and GSM, defaulted to just
GSM), CIDs, APNs, IP and DNS addresses etc. Alright, clearly I'll find
answers on the Optus website and discover after some exploring the SMS
install service. Get them to send me an SMS and doesn't work. Wait for
a day and at least don't get GPRS failed anymore but Connection
Failed. Fool around a bit with an old Data Account and WAP profiles
and finally get a connection to Google. Try my site and get "Bad
Answer from origin server". Dump the HTTP response from the site and
everything looks OK, MIME headers etc. All other sites seem OK, can
even get to my site by searching via Google, which adds to the
confusion (Google I believe acts as some sort of gateway in these
instances so the connection isn't direct to the linked site). Decide
to query newsgroups and someone in the UK and here were kind enough to
try my site and they succeed. Hmm, sounds like it's not my site's
problem or my phone, I decide to contact Customer Help on the Soul
site. They tell me my site is not "GPRS enabled". Through my limited
knowledge of these matters it sounds fishy and I can't confirm
anywhere what that might mean. WAP is built on HTTP and I believe
provided the MIME type is OK then everything is like a normal internet
exchange. Most hosting sites provide the correct outgoing MIME type
for files of type WML as did mine. Approach Soul again and get the
same answer. I persist and tell them that my phone is OK with other
sites and other networks allow access to my site. Again the refuse to
help saying that "Bad answer" is a response from the origin server as
opposed to their systems (!!) and there may be an incompatibility with
the WML language. I try once more asking them to pass my problem to
their engineers or Optus so I can get a real answer that isn't off the
top of their heads and they just fob me off. All I want really is not
a fix to the problem but just a definitive answer.

I give up and buy a Telstra pre-paid and try through them, and hey!
everything works!! So my site was reachable from phones in the US, the
UK, locally via Vodafone and Telstra, but not the one stupid
connection I had with Soul/Optus. Soul simply didn;t want to find out
what the actual problem was, probably because they were too busy with
simple "GPRS failed" calls!