The Wireless Communications Transfer Protocol (WCTP) is specifically aimed at creating an easy means of passing alphanumeric and binary messages to and from wireline systems and two-way capable wireless devices. A draft proposal was submitted to the Radio Paging Community, through an ad hoc "Messaging Standards Committee", as means to foster industry input, co-operation, study, promotion and participation in its further expansion and growth as an open, non-proprietary standard. The Messaging Standards Committee is a group of paging industry manufacturers and carriers focused on rapidly creating mutually agreeable standards to address emerging applications that can not be easily realized through the utilization of existing standards. The Committee accepted the first proposal and established a WCTP drafting sub-committee to further enhance the protocol and release it in the form of this specification. The sub-committee is continuing its efforts to refine the features and capabilities of the protocol, and further feature richness will be introduced in future revisions. It is the intent of the drafting committee to provide the greatest degree of revision compatibility between releases as possible, so as to easily allow for the incorporation of new features and to provide a means for systems operating at different protocol revisions to communicate. With the completion of the first full release of the WCTP specification, the Personal Communications Industry Association agreed to adopt the protocol as a PCIA standard and support the continued activities of the working group as an official PCIA technical sub-committee.

   Although introduced through the paging industry, WCTP is directly applicable for messaging to/from most other wireless technologies including PCS, GSM, and cellular.

   The wireless industry today hosts a range of different protocols of varying complexities and capabilities to submit messages into a wireless network (e.g. TAP, TNPP, TDP/TME, TME-X, WMtp™, WMapi™, UCP, I4, and SMPP). In certain cases, messages are submitted within the confines of Internet Standard protocols such as the Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP/Email protocol) or the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP). In these cases the extent of the information that may be conveyed to the wireless network is limited due to the nature of these generalized protocols. Sometimes carriers further offer specialized software development kits providing Application Programming Interfaces (API's) which are specific to their individual networks. Oftentimes, the implementers of wireless enabled applications need to find the right protocol to integrate into their application for a particular network, only to find that they need to re-implement their application under another protocol for another wireless two-way network.