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Kannel: Open-Source WAP and SMS Gateway

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98 points thunderbong | 4 comments | 21 Dec 24 10:15 UTC | HN request time: 0.848s | source
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pavlov ◴[21 Dec 24 11:59 UTC] No.42479172[source]▶
> “HTTP is also too inefficient for wireless use. By using a semantically equivalent, but binary and compressed format it is possible to reduce the protocol overhead to a few bytes per request, instead of up to hundreds of bytes.”

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.

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1. cherryteastain ◴[21 Dec 24 12:18 UTC] No.42479250[source]▶
We're better off than that scenario, but not much better. Apple and Google ended up owning the phone operating systems so only the things that they deem acceptable are what the vast majority of users are allowed to use.
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2. pavlov ◴[21 Dec 24 12:38 UTC] No.42479330[source]▶
Do Apple and Google stop you from opening a web browser and navigating to any web site?

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.

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3. lxgr ◴[21 Dec 24 14:05 UTC] No.42479744[source]▶
> Do Apple and Google stop you from opening a web browser and navigating to any web site?

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.

4. cherryteastain ◴[21 Dec 24 15:23 UTC] No.42480159[source]▶
No, they are less direct but not less malicious [1]

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