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Kannel: Open-Source WAP and SMS Gateway

(www.kannel.org)
98 points thunderbong | 1 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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usr1106 ◴[21 Dec 24 12:17 UTC] No.42479245[source]▶
> 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)

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"
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diggan ◴[21 Dec 24 12:19 UTC] No.42479256[source]▶
I don't think their proxy server would use Opera Mini as the user-agent. 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.

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.

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usr1106 ◴[21 Dec 24 12:30 UTC] No.42479290{3}[source]▶
I know the user causing those log entries personally. They use Opera Mini on an ancient SymbianOS phone.

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.

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1. usr1106 ◴[21 Dec 24 12:35 UTC] No.42479309{4}[source]▶
Actually I would not have needed to redact the IP address. It's not the end user but Opera's proxy:

    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"