Theoretical app, what do you think?

[Xanthe_2871]

Dial up through SMS. Think about it, there are a lot of situations where a user might have unlimited texting, but no data. You could be on a prepaid plan or a very affordable plan, you could be a T-Mobile customer on a long GoGo enabled flight who doesn't want to pay, etc. 

 

What if there was an app that used SMS messages to send those 1's and 0's of the internet through texting in a fashion similar to dial up? It could even benefit from reasonable speeds within certain situations by encoding compatible information in base 65,536 via special characters and if MMS is available it could even encode data in photos or audio. 

 

Sure, it would be slow, but it might be enough to get a user access to email, news, basic social media, photo sharing, etc. 

 

How bad of an idea is this? Or is it awesome? My biggest worry would be carriers blocking it once it became popular... But I'd like to know what you think!

[Pocketbird]

this would be the coolest thing ever if you can get it to work. but idk if you even can

[Guest]

Only if the site was text based only with no pic at all. Not sure how to do but surely providers can't just let you walk free with that "exploit". They track you too and can tell if you have been sending out suspicious SMS

[Xanthe_2871]

1 minute ago, deXxterlab97 said:

Only if the site was text based only with no pic at all. Not sure how to do but surely providers can't just let you walk free with that "exploit". They track you too and can tell if you have been sending out suspicious SMS

I suppose it could encrypt the data too, but that would add to the already very slowly service. It won't work if it "works" but it's so slow websites time out. 

 

It would probably need to be a custom web browser app with permissions to send and receive SMS in the background. It would also need to hide it's activity from the phone's native SMS app. 

[Guest]

4 minutes ago, Xanthe_2871 said:

I suppose it could encrypt the data too, but that would add to the already very slowly service. It won't work if it "works" but it's so slow websites time out. 

 

It would probably need to be a custom web browser app with permissions to send and receive SMS in the background. It would also need to hide it's activity from the phone's native SMS app. 

You better off at this point paying for the internet plan...  Cost seems high and are you willing to give it/share it for free to others (who would pay to get free internet and I think there are 1 time payment internet) 

[Xanthe_2871]

11 minutes ago, deXxterlab97 said:

You better off at this point paying for the internet plan...  Cost seems high and are you willing to give it/share it for free to others (who would pay to get free internet and I think there are 1 time payment internet) 

The app could be free with ads, or worse it could be free but collect data on all your browsing habits... If I made such an app definitely not option number 2!

 

If it were a paid app, even a one time purchase, then users would want their money back if the service were blocked by carriers. With ads you'd get to keep that money. Unless the carrier's sue you. But that shouldn't happen since all you did was make the tool, you think developer didn't sign any agreements with them!

[raxbg]

You should not think about making profit of this. Also I don't believe it will have any big success anyways. However it is a very cool idea and I definitely think it is worth trying it out. This kind of useless but challenging to make software is what boosts experience the most I think, so you should definitely try it. If you feel interested in doing it, I would say you must do it regardless of other opinions. If it happens to be a hit you can always include ads, just don't think about monetizing it from the beginning.

 

Also note that you will probably need to get a dedicated server and a phone number which will be used to communicate with your app. You must be prepared for delays in communication though, because you cannot rely on instant message delivery. So if you need to send/receive a bigger chunk of data, that could be potentially hours for several megabytes.

 

It is also possible that on rooted androids you will be able to add your app as a network device and make it handle any network traffic.

[HatchetEgg]

If it were to become popular the downside is that the mobile providers could find a way to slam down on this in some way.

[vorticalbox]

one sms is 255 chars, a website even just html and css would require a lot of messages to send.

[Xanthe_2871]

1 hour ago, vorticalbox said:

one sms is 255 chars, a website even just html and css would require a lot of messages to send.

That's where the base 65,536 comes in. For certain types of content that could help out a lot. Like maybe for JPEG images. 

[Xanthe_2871]

1 hour ago, raxbg said:

You should not think about making profit of this. Also I don't believe it will have any big success anyways. However it is a very cool idea and I definitely think it is worth trying it out. This kind of useless but challenging to make software is what boosts experience the most I think, so you should definitely try it. If you feel interested in doing it, I would say you must do it regardless of other opinions. If it happens to be a hit you can always include ads, just don't think about monetizing it from the beginning.

 

Also note that you will probably need to get a dedicated server and a phone number which will be used to communicate with your app. You must be prepared for delays in communication though, because you cannot rely on instant message delivery. So if you need to send/receive a bigger chunk of data, that could be potentially hours for several megabytes.

 

It is also possible that on rooted androids you will be able to add your app as a network device and make it handle any network traffic.

You're absolutely right, and money aside let's say this was developed as a hobby, I think the logic for handling missing/out of order texts would need to be pretty impressive. 

 

In theory it could work, since all the right parts are there, but I think this is looking more and more like some huge project that would need hardcore programmers and not some little script! I think the looming danger of carriers blocking it would stop anyone from investing the time needed. 

 

Pretend for a moment that a single message sent to load linustechtips.com looked like this:

 

u8MRf4BXOQwVoDOh
kod8ukU7vBOew87p
zzjV23jHIv4bltnd
8Ep2ycOqepsNxEsa
Tk0HegvvkplIe92p
2CPEZJLEBdIw307a
qBRqU4AjjzD9Lwy3
FN5DF9UZQ8X2BQv2
4L99cfalxKO8Pf7N
xspk0sr2mmfv7PzK
yB7K3tF4wm0j1X8L
D4CxXy9NXxbtGSSu
w9UGRhbsL0zTeO5S
tKO20R3aYHuPICYh
8gQ1ML3yRPU0OXjK
Xz7eqJsakV6ipCV4

 

It could be made even more dense if we included special characters and emoji and whatnot, you know used a character set of 65,536 different Unicode characters, but it would still take a ton of messages to send even a small amount of data.