Kannel: Open-Source WAP and SMS Gateway

Around the turn of the millennium, there were numerous international committees and hundreds of millions of dollars spent by companies on this idea that we simply can’t use the existing internet on mobile phones, so there needs to be something else.

Of course for the companies it was mostly a plot to capture the web, which was uncomfortably open and uncontrolled. The mobile operators were used to charging 20 cents for sending a 140-character message and 1 euro for delivering a monophonic ringtone. They wanted to be the gatekeepers and content curators of the mobile web, taking a cut on every bit of content that flows to devices. (I remember vision PowerPoints where operators imagined that one day when video can be watched on mobile phones, they’d be making more money from each watch than the studios.)

“We must save 200 bytes on HTTP headers or the network will melt!” was just a convenient excuse to build a stack they could own end-to-end.

And even so, loading a 0.1MB WAP website still took time. The pipes were really slow back then, and the devices not being like the pocket computers we have today.

> The mobile operators were used to charging 20 cents for sending a 140-character message.

In Sweden when I was young, it was pretty common for us to have monthly plans with unlimited text messages included (but not surfing, no one did that on the phone anyways). Even with that, WAP seemed to have served some sort of purpose, at least for me personally.

That is still running. The SymbianOS version of the Opera Mini browser still works.

From my Web server log:

    88.88.88.88 [20/Dec/2024:18:55:10 "GET /redacted HTTP/1.1" 200 75 r:- "Opera/9.80 (Series 60; Opera Mini/7.1.32444/191.361; U; de) Presto/2.12.423 Version/12.16"

If I remember this correctly, I'd expect the user-agent to be something like "Opera Proxy" or "Opera Compressor", not the user agent of the browser itself. But again, I might remember this all incorrectly, was a long time ago and I was just a kid.

So how has this changed? Nowadays Google and and Meta are the gatekeepers. The business model has changed from billing the end customer to personal data prostitution. You sell us your private life and we give you "free" services to get even more personal data. Disregarding the ethical aspects: If you look at Google's profits and the money they can happily spend on paying fines to regulators, it's obvious that we have no functioning market economy.

In the old days one could still change between ~3 competing operators and one was typically competing on price. Nowadays you don't really have that option. Maybe every n years when you have to biy a new phone you can choose between Android and Apple, but it's a limited choice.

The problem turned out to be more short-lived than anyone imagined in 1999, and fortunately the power grab failed too. Steve Jobs hammered the definitive last nails onto that coffin. Mobile operators became the dumb pipes that was always their worst nightmare.

Yes, it works like you describe. They use a compressed protocol between the client and the proxy. The DOM might not even be based on HTML, not sure about that.

    82.145.211.80 [20/Dec/2024:18:10:36 "GET /redacted HTTP/1.1" 200 75 r:- "Opera/9.80 (Series 60; Opera Mini/7.1.32444/191.361; U; de) Presto/2.12.423 Version/12.16"

Because that was the trillion-dollar vision for mobile operator owned WAP portals around 1999. They would completely control access to online services on mobile devices. That was how they planned to get a cut on everything you view on a phone.

This was not unreasonable. GPRS started to roll out around 2002. And it was quite spotty initially, to say the least. The phone hardware was also quite underpowered, good old Nokia 3310 had a whopping 2kB of RAM accessible to the software.

I got my first mobile phone in 2000 that had WAP-over-SMS, and it was quite useful. I could check the weather forecast, and my university had a nice WAP site with important notifications (scheduling changes, exam reminders, etc.)

Google and Apple happen to have devices that most people use, but if you want to you can buy USB adapters to use on a laptop, or some laptops have built-in mobile data.

I think people making this type of comment like “there’s no difference now” just were not around back then and have really no context on just how completely locked down the wireless carriers had things back then.

In 2017ish, I've overheard from a friend who used to work for Opera, that back in their time they were using Presto (their in-house engine) on the backend to pre-render/optimise/compress pages. Think smart VPN/proxy.

Also, heck yes, Opera on "dumb" phones was an amazing experience - compared to the built-in contemporary browsers.

It was absolutely amazing. And it's still around! I have an install on my iPhone; while the app seems to be unpublished in most western countries' App Store, I can still use it just fine. I believe the Android and J2ME versions are still actively installable.

Although I just gave it a try, and the iOS version seems to not be the real deal anymore; it seems to use a media compression proxy and regular WebKit to render on the iOS side. The Android version still does server-side rendering.

It does, I just checked:

> Opera/9.80 (Android; Opera Mini/87.0.2254/191.361; U; en) Presto/2.12.423 Version/12.16

> What I seem to remember, was that they run this proxy which did the fetching for you, did some ridiculous compression or similar, and then sent you the compressed reply.

That's Opera Turbo, a feature of Opera Mobile (which is a full browser, HTML, JavaScript and all), which indeed compressed images and other media in a lossy way (and text losslessly, if it wasn't already at the HTTP level, I assume).

Opera Mini actually renders HTML (and executes JavaScript for a couple of seconds) server-side and then sends a binary version of that pre-render to the phone. I imagine it to be closer to SVG or PDF than to HTML and CSS.

Apple kind of does, yes. They do let me use exactly one web browser.

On my old Symbian phone, I had the choice of the built-in WebKit browser, Opera Mini, Opera Mobile, all with different rendering engines and their various advantages and downsides.

Now it's all WebKit frontends.

> That was how they planned to get a cut on everything you view on a phone.

Apple does get a cut of every web search I do, and I can't even use the search engine of my choice.

Not that I think the mobile phone operators and manufacturers of the early 2000s would be better custodians of user freedom on their devices, but I don't think it's correct to paint this as an unequivocal change for the better.

There was more design by committee back then (and the committees were as bureaucratic as it gets, just open any 3GPP or OMA specification and you'll never complain about anything W3C again), but there was also more pluralism of device design and UX aesthetics, and more than two implementations of everything, both by US companies sometimes struggling to empathize with users living in other countries and speaking other languages.

Some IoT devices run on CR2032 Lithium cells, and even a single order of magnitude still matters there.

Network data usage can be a consideration too. Some IoT devices use satellites as a backhaul; you definitely don't want to (and in fact can't) run HTTP over something like Iridium SBD, for example.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Environment_Integrity

But if you want a smartphone like most people these days, you’re out of luck.

Things are almost infinitely better on the network side, and I don’t miss operators dictating when I get a firmware update or which app store I can use. But now Apple does that, and Google isn’t a really great alternative either for other reasons.

That was (and probably still is to some degree?) the case in the US. Here in this country SIM-locked phones have been forbidden for more than 20 years. Phone subscriptions have limited competition because the were only 4, later 3 operators. And the most aggressive price challenging service providers get acquired by the bigger ones.

But phones have fully free competition, you buy them from a domestic or international store, from your own operator, or from a competitor, just as you prefer.

They were the first[1] to ship a "real" web browser on a phone, and they were large enough to bully carriers into submissions and force them to provide them a raw data pipe, no "special" services.

When people at RIM (AKA Blackberry) saw this, they were outraged, as no carrier would ever let them get away with that. Their solution had to be far more integrated with carrier infrastructure, it was very far from Apple's "just let us do TCP/IP and we will handle the rest" approach.

[1] At least for "real" consumers, there was probably a way to get one on some phone somewhere before that, but it was obscure enough that nobody really did.

[2] source: Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry: 9781250096067: McNish, Jacquie, Silcoff, Sean