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Kannel: Open-Source WAP and SMS Gateway (kannel.org)
pavlov 1 hours ago [-]
> “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.

diggan 55 minutes ago [-]
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.

pavlov 33 minutes ago [-]
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.

usr1106 45 minutes ago [-]
> 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"
diggan 43 minutes ago [-]
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.

usr1106 32 minutes ago [-]
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.

usr1106 26 minutes ago [-]
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"
usr1106 35 minutes ago [-]
> 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.

sabbaticaldev 28 minutes ago [-]
the fact that other companies succeeded doesn’t have much to do with the many that failed with terrible assumptions
cherryteastain 44 minutes ago [-]
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.
pavlov 23 minutes ago [-]
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.

fulafel 50 minutes ago [-]
Yep, it was obsoleted before it could catch one. Sadly not so with IoT devices. Today's IoT device hardware would run HTTPS, JSON etc just fine, but there are all kinds of constrained weird protocols used, and lots of companies there have incentives to perpetuate it.
cyberax 6 minutes ago [-]
> 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.

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.)

userbinator 1 hours ago [-]
but a reasonably fast PC workstation (400 MHz Pentium II, 128 MB RAM) should serve several concurrent users without problems.

Back when software was actually efficient... and of course when WAP meant something entirely different!

argulane 2 hours ago [-]
It's cool to see that they are still going. To any one looking to using this for SMPP connections should skip the releases and build it straight from SVN trunk to get the latest bugfixes.
2 hours ago [-]
ForHackernews 26 minutes ago [-]
Wow, this is a blast from the past.

Many years ago, before most phones had mobile internet, I was running a web-to-WAP reverse proxy using https://web.archive.org/web/20080209153558/www.hottproxy.org... to get mobile web access on my LG VX 5400 flip phone.

You could go into the secret admin menu, reconfigure the WAP gateway away from the carrier's captive portal to your own proxy and voila! Unlimited free access to the real web! (at 3G speeds)

2-3-7-43-1807 56 minutes ago [-]
this should have a (2018) in the title.

anyway - is wap still an interesting or relevant technology? "relevant" from the perspective of someone with a hacker mindset. from a modern perspective it is probably just useless.

Kwpolska 25 minutes ago [-]
It is not interesting or relevant in any way, I doubt any mobile network still supports WAP.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2 hours ago [-]
This is an SMS spamming tool, right?
argulane 2 hours ago [-]
We use it to send OTP messages through few telco providers who don't have HTTP API.
2 hours ago [-]
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