Free Country Wide, Mobile Internet Idea.

clearz

Just an idea I have had for a while about a rather unreliable way of recieving internet content on your laptop through a mobile phone. I havent the time at the moment to try and implement a working version yet but tought Id share it. This is based on the fact that meteor offers free multimedia text messenging for life to other Meteor phones (This offer is no longer available to new customers).

What you need:

1) 2 Meteor Smartphones with free MMS messenging for life.
2) A home PC with Broadband Internet connection.
3) A laptop.
4) Some programming skills of course.

How to Implement:

The custom protocol needed would be very similar to the HTTP request/response model. Phone A would be permentaly connected to the home computer through USB cable/Bluetooth ect. This phone would recieve a text message request form the other phone. The home PC would then download the content requested over your broadband connection using a well known protocol such as HTTP/POP3 and encode it as one or more MMS messages which are then texted back to phone B which is connected to your laptop via USB cable/Bluetooth. The laptop would then decode the information from the messages and display it.

Possible Issues.

The main issue that could arise from this is the unrelaibility of text messaging as a data transport method. Although in my expierence MMS messages tend to arrive instantly they have been known to take a few hours to arrive which is totaly unacceptable for the needs of this system.

Im not sure what is the upper limit on the size of MMS messages is but I read that it is 100KB's in the UK so I assume its similar here. If the response was greater than 100KB's a system of sending the data in more than one MMS would be needed. This shouldnt be to hard to implement.


Although this method would not be the fastest most enjoyable way surf the web it could be used to check your emails for free out in that field in connemara. So tell us what you think of this and any other problems/issues that you think could arise.

John.

rsynnott

Eh, you could always just go the whole hog and encode bytes in numbers of rings (one ring == 0x00...). Seriously tho, have seen something somewhat similar to this done with an SMB share... it'd work for HTTP, tho not for the whole internet

clearz

Theorically it would work with any protocol on the Internet. You would just have to build a software bridge between the protocol and your system. Although it would not be practical for some protocols where time is essential e.g. Gaming protocols or streaming content. Take for instance a web page. You could have it so that the page is requested. The server could then send back the page along with all the seperate images and content on a page as seperate files but a better way would be where the server would download the whole page and content then build it into 1 file maybe in the gZip format. This file would then be broken up into ~100Kb segments your system protocol headers and the MMS headers then added and sent back to the laptop.

rsynnott

clearz wrote:

Theorically it would work with any protocol on the Internet. You would just have to build a software bridge between the protocol and your system. Although it would not be practical for some protocols where time is essential e.g. Gaming protocols or streaming content. Take for instance a web page. You could have it so that the page is requested. The server could then send back the page along with all the seperate images and content on a page as seperate files but a better way would be where the server would download the whole page and content then build it into 1 file maybe in the gZip format. This file would then be broken up into ~100Kb segments your system protocol headers and the MMS headers then added and sent back to the laptop.

PROBABLY with any TCP thing, probably NOT with any UDP thing. Not nicely, anyway. But yeh, madder things have been done; google IP by Avian Carrier.

clearz

rsynnott wrote:

PROBABLY with any TCP thing, probably NOT with any UDP thing. Not nicely, anyway. But yeh, madder things have been done; google IP by Avian Carrier.

Yea UDP would be pretty much out of the question.

lol Maybe I could submit it as as a RFC

RFC 4549 - IP over Meteor mobile phones in Ireland.

stevenmu

You could handle the unreliability of the 'connection' using acknowledgements and timeouts, and having a few bits in each message dedicated to ordering etc. But it would add a huge overhead in terms of having to send whole messages as acknowledgements or requests for resending particular 'packets'.

Chalk

the latency on sms would be ridicuolus.

also,
mms arent free on meteor, only sms afaik, so you would still be reciveing them via a gprs connectrion and paying per kb, no?

tw0nk

Chalk wrote:

the latency on sms would be ridicuolus.

also,
mms arent free on meteor, only sms afaik, so you would still be reciveing them via a gprs connectrion and paying per kb, no?

its free to recieve mms on meteor but not to send unless you have the free texts for life, in that case mms are also free to send

Chalk

tw0nk wrote:

its free to recieve mms on meteor but not to send unless you have the free texts for life, in that case mms are also free to send

didnt know that.

thats pretty interesting then

aspnet

I think that there may be a 30k limit on an MMS....

However I'm not a 100% sure on this.

There is also the possibility that you would have to host your own MMSC...