Show HN: Smozzy (for Android/T-Mobile) - browse the web without a data plan

Well if you look at it, unless you use "text" for "surfing" like in this app, it actually does not cost much to the providers. You can not type all day, can you? So by "unlimited" text all they are saying is that you will tire yourself texting say about X SMS and thats it per day.

1000 SMS * 160 chars * 2 bytes each (arbitrary) = 320000 bytes. Thats just 320KB. Thats cheap isn't it? Can you type more than that per day?

This is almost certain. Even more certain is that they will fight it as long and hard as they can, even if it kills them.

The reason we want this to happen is the same reason the carriers don't want it to happen: it's a lot harder to make margins on being a dumb pipe.

Actually, there is a distinction to the carrier.

Text messages are an interesting one. Essentially, they cost nothing to the carrier in that they get transmitted as part of the control channel. However, there is a cost to supporting a phone idling on a network. The control channel has to be in communication with it using up bandwidth. So, the SMS gets put in with the control channel instructions and so its marginal cost is 0, but there's still a cost. Beyond that, your carrier has to pay a termination fee to the receiving carrier when you send a text message to them and that is a cost. So, when you send a text message off-network, there is a cost to your carrier.

Voice similarly travels a different path. In CDMA systems, the voice channel and data channel are physically separate. Even with UMTS where the voice and data traffic travels over the same channel, there have been significant advancements for data transmission (HSPA, HSPA+) that allow for greater efficiency.

Even with VoIP, a real distinction can be made. Like texting, the carrier of the receiving party charges a termination fee to the carrier of the calling party. So, if you're on Verizon and call a user on Sprint, Sprint charges Verizon to connect the call (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Termination_rates). That means that while VoIP would use network resources in the same way as data, the carrier would face a higher cost because of the termination rate. This is also why many free VoIP services won't let you call those free conference call services (http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/25/att-says-google-voi...). They're usually set up with a carrier who charges an absurd termination rate that pays for the service.

While they are travelling through the same towers, they're taking different paths and those different paths do have different costs. Part of it is regulatory: termination fees are meaningful costs to carriers even if one considers them artificial. Part of it is the current time: in 3-5 years, we'll probably be on VoIP. Part of it is that data transmission (wired or wireless) has low marginal costs, but decent fixed costs: it doesn't cost the carrier much to support you as a marginal user, but they have put tens of billions into their network even if your phone just idles on it. Right now, wireless is priced in a "consumer" way. We don't pay for what we use, but rather some awkward approximation based on what they think consumers will accept charges for. This is in contrast to, say, utilities which usually have a fixed charge for being on the network (to cover fixed costs) and then a usage rate (which covers marginal costs).

I don't really have a conclusion. Carriers are trying to make more money off you in a way that's objectionable, but they aren't the same. I won't defend the pricing, but I want to point out the difference.

These three activities have different QoS constraints: "voice" data is real time, lossy, and therefore has hardware assisted compression and routing; text messages and data are non-lossy, but have drastically different timing and retry constraints. So, even if they "traveled through the same towers and pipes" (they don't, a detail more expanded on by mdasen in his comment), it wouldn't make sense to charge the same for them as they have different cost requirements (although it might be somewhat more equal than it is now; in particular, text messages, which occupy valuable and limited control channel space, would likely become cheaper).

The labour theory of value is not correct. People view talking, texting and internet as different, and hence businesses will charge different for them.

Cell network providers have only recently been dealing with this problem. Landline and Cable providers have been reselling the same pipe through "voice", "data" and "tv" channels for a lot longer, and they continue to get away with it.

Carriers will not voluntarily give up this incremental revenue. I live in Boston, when my choice of cable carrier are Comcast and errr... ummm.. Comcast.

Until there are more competing vendors, I think this transition away from arbitrary labels to one single dumb pipe will be much slower that we all hope.

It is called network neutrality and to them it is as evil as communist conspiracies.

So, I looked at this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_SMS_gateways

Of the four major US providers, T-Mobile and Verizon are the only ones with MMS gateways (I use MMS to send the responses) that don't require a sign in by a customer (I only have T-Mobile myself). I tested Verizon's MMS gateway with my friend who has Verizon cell service, but it didn't seem to work for some reason.

The requests (which are just URLs, and any postdata/cookies if applicable) are sent to my server via SMS.

The responses are sent back to the phone via MMS, in up to 5 (I think?) segments. I download the webpage along with all resources (stylesheets, images, etc.) and put everything in a zip file. I encode the zip file as a PNG (each RGB pixel is 3 bytes of the zip file) and send the PNG in the MMS.

Thanks very much for the praise!

However, unfortunately I don't think emergency use when data services aren't up is a legit use case, since webpages are sent from my server to your phone via MMS and I think MMSes are downloaded via a data connection.

Thanks, it was a lot of fun :)

I hope it doesn't get shut down TOO fast. I think it has a chance since the userbase will probably be very small, since the number of people who have Android phones without a data plan with US T-Mobile is probably on the order of thousands...

I saw this when I was googling around to see if anyone had already done this, but I was kind of confused by what exactly it is. I don't think it's the same thing.

T-Mobile's terms (and I would presume other carriers) already say they can cut your unlimited text off if you're using it as some sort of automated gateway. This is meant to keep you from using your cheap text plan as a commercial SMS service (ex: Twitter), they could cut this off as well.

You would still need an app that could translates the MMS back into a page and open it in a browser on your end.

That's surprisingly hard to do ;( Neither android nor iPhone give access to the voice stream.

I was going to say that we should be encoding IP packets to be sent over SMS so that we can do VoIP over SMS.

This is very difficult because the carrier can/will apply various signal processing algorithms to voice streams, these will really screw with your modulated data.

Funny thing is, I just transferred 1TB of data from work to home (offsite backup) in just 5 minutes today... via bicycle even! Didn't even think of that until just now. Guess the saying still holds true then!

Although to be fair, doing the backups took considerably more time - a usb external hard disk doesn't copy 1TB that quickly...

I don't currently have any plans to expand this since I can only receive SMSes from US phones.

Sorry :(

Not sufficient for day-to-day use, probably between 15 seconds and a minute to get a page. But if you don't have a data plan, it's possibly better than nothing...

None of those things work right now (and honestly probably never will). This only has very basic HTTP functionality.

One of the most annoying ones is when sites have Javascript redirects, because my server doesn't know how to follow those. So going to "twitter.com" doesn't work because they have a Javascript redirect to HTTPS. :|

I'd be surprised if so, the userbase is probably going to be pretty tiny. It's not really easy to get an Android phone without a data plan (although it's possible), and there's not really any reason to use it otherwise, other than initial curiosity.

It's definitely not fast, but it's not quite as bad as you might think. While I was testing it, the whole pipeline, from pressing the "go" button to the page being fully rendered could take as little as 15 seconds.

Granted I'm just releasing this now, so if it gets any users at all we'll see how my cheap VPS holds up...

The downstream is sent by MMS, which is just a file download over the internet, so it's not bad. Though, when I first saw it I thought he was base-64 encoding entire requests and stuffing them into 160-char text messages, which really would be crazy.

Richard Stallman's way is a close 2nd:

For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer. (I also have not net connection much of the time.) To look at page I send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to me. It is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time.

http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/009889.html

I thought http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers took that prize.

Wrong on two counts, the first being that SMS messages are 160 characters, Twitter is 140, the second being that SMS is only used for sending requests, the real data arrives via MMS.