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Kannel: Open-Source WAP and SMS Gateway

(www.kannel.org)
98 points thunderbong | 2 comments | 21 Dec 24 10:15 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | 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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diggan ◴[21 Dec 24 12:06 UTC] No.42479197[source]▶
I don't know if you tried to use the web via 3G or even GPRS, but I remember I did, and it was terribly slow. Opera Mini/Mobile ran some sort of proxy service that made things faster (not sure how or what that was, I was too young to understand anything) and helped a little bit, but the best thing you could come across was dedicated WAP websites that basically were "website lite" versions some websites ran concurrently with their real websites.

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.

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1. pavlov ◴[21 Dec 24 12:29 UTC] No.42479287[source]▶
Both are true: WAP was technically a well-intentioned (if poorly designed) solution to a real problem, while also being a cynical power grab by the operators.

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.

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2. diggan ◴[21 Dec 24 17:18 UTC] No.42480868[source]▶
The influence of Steve Jobs in Sweden was basically nil at that point in time when it comes to cellphones and internet on cellphones. What put the nail in the coffin there, was the launch of a new company (called 3 or "Three", was new in Sweden at least) which promised connection to a new network/stack called 3G. With 3G, you no longer needed to use WAP. We were all using Sony Ericsson and Motorola Razor (Razer?) when 3G arrived, and the iPhone was still years away at that point.