7 ms·

Kannel: Open-Source WAP and SMS Gateway

103 points by thunderbong 2y ago

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
This is an SMS spamming tool, right?
- argulane 2y ago
  We use it to send OTP messages through few telco providers who don't have HTTP API.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - adriaanmol 2y ago
    Easier to use https://www.bird.com/developer/sms-api https://www.bird.com/developer/sms-api ;-)
    - argulane 2y ago
      Unfortunally they didn't exist when we started with kannel
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
argulane 2y 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.
userbinator 2y 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!
pavlov 2y 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 2y 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.
  - usr1106 2y 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"
2-3-7-43-1807 2y 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 2y ago
  It is not interesting or relevant in any way, I doubt any mobile network still supports WAP.
  - lxgr 2y ago
    Given that this is a WAP gateway, you don't need your mobile network to support WAP; a TCP connection to the gateway should be enough (either via IP, or via dialup, if you can still find a network that supports circuit-switched data and a low-jitter VoIP or circuit-switched landline that can terminate a data call). > It is not interesting or relevant in any way In a technological-historical way it definitely is. I find it pretty interesting to see how things used to be done, and try to see which design decisions were just following the hype, and which actually were ingenious solutions to real constraints of the time.
ForHackernews 2y 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/ 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)
lxgr 2y ago
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…
srmarm 2y ago
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?
- lmz 2y ago
  Isn't that what the middlebox (e.g. Kannel) was for? To transcode text to binary xml?
lxgr 2y ago
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?
joecool1029 2y ago
Weird to see this mentioned now since I just mentioned it a few comments ago. But if you just have an old device and need a WAP 1.0 gateway you can use this: https://nbpfan.bs0dd.net/index.php?lang=eng&page=wap%2Fmain https://nbpfan.bs0dd.net/index.php?lang=eng&page=wap%2Fmain Here's a pic of my first cellphone loading it earlier this year: https://files.catbox.moe/cmi78w.jpeg 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.
- DanAtC 2y ago
  Is T-Mobile's 2G network still alive? I thought it was shut down months ago. On that note, are there any 4G phones that support WAP? Edit: I saw your comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42434295 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42434295 Using an eUICC is a neat hack! I'll have to try that.
  - joecool1029 2y ago
    Yeah, they were going to shut down but it doesn't cost them anything to keep it running and avoids a lot of liability on devices that can't do voLTE/voNR (for 911/government/legacy). I would imagine it's also a small revenue stream from international roamers on their network. They had good spectrum planning so it fits in their guard bands in 1900mhz without fucking up LTE or NR deployments. That or since Neville retired (the CTO for most of their history) they stopped beating deadlines.
- lhamil64 2y ago
  Out of curiosity, how did you get your old phone online? Did it have wifi, or were you able to get it on an actual mobile network? I thought I heard the 2g/3g networks have mostly shut down, at least in the US
  - joecool1029 2y ago
kerkeslager 2y ago
Kannel should take a page from the Weatherization Assistance Program and promote their work on the Wireless Application Protocol with contemporary music.
_yb2s 2y ago
I remember WAP was very popular in the summer of 2020. From what I remember the “authentication protocol” wasn’t very “secure.” A 3rd party “gym hat” type device is typically recommended.
kittikitti 2y ago
[flagged]
egorfine 2y ago
Oh the memories. I have been running the first WAP gateway in Ukraine on Kannel.

103 points by thunderbong 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago

This is an SMS spamming tool, right?

argulane 2y ago
We use it to send OTP messages through few telco providers who don't have HTTP API.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- adriaanmol 2y ago
  Easier to use https://www.bird.com/developer/sms-api https://www.bird.com/developer/sms-api ;-)
  - argulane 2y ago
    Unfortunally they didn't exist when we started with kannel
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

argulane 2y 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.

userbinator 2y 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!

pavlov 2y 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 2y 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.
- usr1106 2y 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"

2-3-7-43-1807 2y 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 2y ago
It is not interesting or relevant in any way, I doubt any mobile network still supports WAP.
- lxgr 2y ago
  Given that this is a WAP gateway, you don't need your mobile network to support WAP; a TCP connection to the gateway should be enough (either via IP, or via dialup, if you can still find a network that supports circuit-switched data and a low-jitter VoIP or circuit-switched landline that can terminate a data call). > It is not interesting or relevant in any way In a technological-historical way it definitely is. I find it pretty interesting to see how things used to be done, and try to see which design decisions were just following the hype, and which actually were ingenious solutions to real constraints of the time.

ForHackernews 2y 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/ 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)

lxgr 2y ago

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…

srmarm 2y ago

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?

lmz 2y ago
Isn't that what the middlebox (e.g. Kannel) was for? To transcode text to binary xml?

lxgr 2y ago

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?

joecool1029 2y ago

Weird to see this mentioned now since I just mentioned it a few comments ago. But if you just have an old device and need a WAP 1.0 gateway you can use this: https://nbpfan.bs0dd.net/index.php?lang=eng&page=wap%2Fmain https://nbpfan.bs0dd.net/index.php?lang=eng&page=wap%2Fmain Here's a pic of my first cellphone loading it earlier this year: https://files.catbox.moe/cmi78w.jpeg 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.

DanAtC 2y ago
Is T-Mobile's 2G network still alive? I thought it was shut down months ago. On that note, are there any 4G phones that support WAP? Edit: I saw your comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42434295 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42434295 Using an eUICC is a neat hack! I'll have to try that.
- joecool1029 2y ago
  Yeah, they were going to shut down but it doesn't cost them anything to keep it running and avoids a lot of liability on devices that can't do voLTE/voNR (for 911/government/legacy). I would imagine it's also a small revenue stream from international roamers on their network. They had good spectrum planning so it fits in their guard bands in 1900mhz without fucking up LTE or NR deployments. That or since Neville retired (the CTO for most of their history) they stopped beating deadlines.
lhamil64 2y ago
Out of curiosity, how did you get your old phone online? Did it have wifi, or were you able to get it on an actual mobile network? I thought I heard the 2g/3g networks have mostly shut down, at least in the US
- joecool1029 2y ago

kerkeslager 2y ago

Kannel should take a page from the Weatherization Assistance Program and promote their work on the Wireless Application Protocol with contemporary music.

_yb2s 2y ago

I remember WAP was very popular in the summer of 2020. From what I remember the “authentication protocol” wasn’t very “secure.” A 3rd party “gym hat” type device is typically recommended.

kittikitti 2y ago

[flagged]

egorfine 2y ago

Oh the memories. I have been running the first WAP gateway in Ukraine on Kannel.