Although it was allegedly designed to operate on top of Wi-Fi, compatibility with the security protocol used by the 802.11 wireless networking standard developed by the IEEE is in dispute.
The WAPI standard (draft JTC1/SC6 N14619) allows selection of the symmetric encryption algorithm, either AES or SMS4, which has been declassified in January 2006 and passed evaluation by independent experts[who?].
TBT (Technical Barrier to Trade) declarations to the WTO in January 2006 and a statement in June 2006 to ISO/IEC JTC1/SC6, in which SAC said they would not respect the status of 802.11i as an international standard, seemed to support this possibility[citation needed].
Positive votes and commitments to participate in the standardisation process were received from China, Korea, Czech Republic, Switzerland and Kenya.
The US and the IEEE 802.11 Working Group provided numerous detailed comments rebutting the case for standardisation made by the China NB in the New Project proposal.
The required comment resolution on the ballot only started in June 2011, with the US, UK, China, Korea and Switzerland NBs and the IEEE 802.11 Working Group all participating.
The Swiss NB representative admitted during the process that he was a paid consultant to IWNCOMM, the Chinese source of the WAPI technology[citation needed].
The Kenya and Czech NBs did not participate in the comment resolution process or in any other discussions related to WAPI after the close of the ballot in early 2010.
In addition, despite mandates for WAPI to be implemented in China in Wi-Fi enabled mobile phones and by the three Chinese service providers, it is very rarely used in practice.
[6] According to China's State Radio Monitoring Center Chinese, in April 2011 regulators approved the frequency ranges used by a new Apple mobile phone with 3G and wireless LAN support including WAPI.