Newer mid-2000's phones are WAP 2.0 and don't need a gateway (they also mostly support j2me, so this is the way to have a mostly usable browser with opera mini, otherwise pretty much all TLS sites but m.google.com will fail)
EDIT: I am on t-mobile and they shut down their WAP gateway ages ago with the exception of MMS.
> “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.
I vaguely remember seeing a physical boxed software title in my local stationary/book/media store that I am pretty sure in retrospect must have been a WAP gateway you could install on Windows and dial up to your modem from a mobile phone.
The idea was presumably that if you'd have a second line or maybe broadband connection on your computer, you could save on your mobile operator's WAP fees if you had cheaper local calls to your own landline, or possibly access local data on your PC?
I know the article sort of touches on it but I only recall WAP as being a sort of mark up language akin to a mobile HTML rather than a network layer protocol. My old site (probably late 90s) had a wap.mysite.com subdomain which I hosted them on and which seemed to work well on my limited testing - I don't recall setting anything special up with the hosting - just the same hosting as the regular site. It worked very well on the contemporary mobiles but did I miss something back then?
joecool1029 ·35 minutes ago
Here's a pic of my first cellphone loading it earlier this year: https://files.catbox.moe/cmi78w.jpeg
Newer mid-2000's phones are WAP 2.0 and don't need a gateway (they also mostly support j2me, so this is the way to have a mostly usable browser with opera mini, otherwise pretty much all TLS sites but m.google.com will fail)
EDIT: I am on t-mobile and they shut down their WAP gateway ages ago with the exception of MMS.
pavlov ·5 hours 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.
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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lxgr ·2 hours ago
The idea was presumably that if you'd have a second line or maybe broadband connection on your computer, you could save on your mobile operator's WAP fees if you had cheaper local calls to your own landline, or possibly access local data on your PC?
userbinator ·5 hours ago
Back when software was actually efficient... and of course when WAP meant something entirely different!
srmarm ·3 hours ago
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