3 ms·

At the low end of the spectrum ($10/month prepaid), at least in Canada, unlimited international SMS/MMS is part of the menu. It's gone from an overpriced premi

At the low end of the spectrum ($10/month prepaid), at least in Canada, unlimited international SMS/MMS is part of the menu. It's gone from an overpriced premium feature to all the way down to the baseline. At about half a megabyte of payload, it works very well to send photos, voice clips, even videos (10-15 seconds, or the quality degrades too much), also contact cards. These days you have to actively resist Google upgrading you to their enhanced messenger app; once you have that picture messages will be sent using normal mobile data. It is a little known legacy feature even here. I find that about 80% of random phones have it provisioned correctly; for the rest it can be manually done by fiddling with the APN settings but virtually nobody knows how to do that.

Nextgrid 5y ago
The problem is that the carriers are in control of it and you never know what you’re going to get at the end, if anything. The media may get recompressed several times along the way. The infrastructure involved is also ancient and poorly maintained, lots of “unknown unknowns” that can cause trouble.
- password4321 5y ago
  Pardon my ignorance, but is there any app/client/software that takes the interference out of the equation by encrypting (or at least encoding) the content in transit? Doing so would be possible over vanilla SMS as well, I guess.
  - afiori 5y ago
    originally signal worked like this
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    It could technically work, but then there's a chance that if your file (which is no longer JPEG) can't be parsed by the carrier's infrastructure it will simply reject it (or worse - crash it), so your encrypted file still needs to look like a valid image, but then your encoding scheme should be robust enough to survive being recompressed multiple times.
    - Denatonium 5y ago
      This depends greatly on the carriers involved. At least with Verizon (in USA), simply having a PNG header and extension is enough for a file to be classified as an image. If the "image" is 1MB or less, the image doesn't get reencoded. I took advantage of this back in the day (when I had a severely limited data plan and unlimited texting), by writing a script for my computer that would take a large file, split it into 1MB chunks, prepend a 1x1px PNG image to the chunks, and send them to my number through the email-to-MMS gateway sequentially. Then on my phone, I wrote a script that would remove the PNG headers and concatenate the chunks, giving me the original file. My workflow consisted of SSH-ing into my PC from my phone, initiating a download, and then running the downloaded file through my scripts. By doing this, I could send up to 500MB per day to my phone without using any data.

Nextgrid 5y ago

The problem is that the carriers are in control of it and you never know what you’re going to get at the end, if anything. The media may get recompressed several times along the way. The infrastructure involved is also ancient and poorly maintained, lots of “unknown unknowns” that can cause trouble.

password4321 5y ago
Pardon my ignorance, but is there any app/client/software that takes the interference out of the equation by encrypting (or at least encoding) the content in transit? Doing so would be possible over vanilla SMS as well, I guess.
- afiori 5y ago
  originally signal worked like this
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  It could technically work, but then there's a chance that if your file (which is no longer JPEG) can't be parsed by the carrier's infrastructure it will simply reject it (or worse - crash it), so your encrypted file still needs to look like a valid image, but then your encoding scheme should be robust enough to survive being recompressed multiple times.
  - Denatonium 5y ago
    This depends greatly on the carriers involved. At least with Verizon (in USA), simply having a PNG header and extension is enough for a file to be classified as an image. If the "image" is 1MB or less, the image doesn't get reencoded. I took advantage of this back in the day (when I had a severely limited data plan and unlimited texting), by writing a script for my computer that would take a large file, split it into 1MB chunks, prepend a 1x1px PNG image to the chunks, and send them to my number through the email-to-MMS gateway sequentially. Then on my phone, I wrote a script that would remove the PNG headers and concatenate the chunks, giving me the original file. My workflow consisted of SSH-ing into my PC from my phone, initiating a download, and then running the downloaded file through my scripts. By doing this, I could send up to 500MB per day to my phone without using any data.