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?
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!
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?
Even though it never really took off (at least in Europe), I find SMS as a bearer medium for the WAP 1.0 stack fascinating.
One of my first PDAs could do something similar for sharing files as a series of concatenated binary SMS over an Infrared connection via a mobile phone.
The only problem was that SMS was paid per message in my country (double-digit cents each). Fortunately the preview dialog showed the estimated number of messages before sending – and it was something like 1000 for a small JPEG…
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.
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)
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.
This is an SMS spamming tool, right?
> “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.