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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: 0s | 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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usr1106 ◴[21 Dec 24 12:26 UTC] No.42479283[source]▶
> 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,

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.

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orev ◴[21 Dec 24 13:36 UTC] No.42479586[source]▶
No, this is a completely different scenario. There’s a huge difference between the companies who provide the pipes having full control over everything (the way it was back then) and what we have today which is that some companies have become defacto standard platform providers. It’s the difference between having to pay a toll every time you leave your driveway vs. paying for things at whatever store you decided to drive to.

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.

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1. lxgr ◴[21 Dec 24 15:58 UTC] No.42480370{3}[source]▶
> 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.

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.