When the Telcos get their fingers dirty

Posted on June 17, 2008 by Nick. Posted in Uncategorized.

Late last week, while browsing peacefully on my mobile phone, I noticed that Vodafone NZ had injected a header and a footer in all the pages that they were converting from HTML into WML to be displayed on my cheap phone.

So here is what I have to say about this:
1. By doing this Vodafone interferes with my browsing experience. I hate it.
2. When connecting from a Java Application things get really messed up. Those extra bytes make communication impossible. What this means is unhappy service providers and very angry customers.
3. Customers may think that they are paying for those images every time they see them. Hopefully that is not true; I imagine that they traffic to those resources is whitelisted but hey, one never knows.
4. Downloading a Java Application / Game has just become a tougher task if the Jar is not served from a secure server.

There are some clarifications that I should make:
- https traffic does not get the "extra" content injected in the translated pages
- this problem only applies to one access point: Vodafone Live!. The Internet access point is not "affected" by Vodafone's generosity. In other words make sure you are not using live.vodafone.com as your APN if you do not want the freebies. Just check that you are using www.vodafone.net.nz as your APN and your Java apps will be sweet.

I feel sorry for all the ANZ and National Bank customers that use Mobile Banking and have Vodafone phones. Chances are they are using the default APN (the so called VFNZ Gateway) which means that the requests from Mobile Banking will fail. I guess choosing HTTP for communicating with the back end servers was not the wisest idea. Kiwibank on the other hand stayed clear from that and is still up and running, thanks to the fact that HTTPS traffic cannot be changed on the fly that easily.

Cheers…

Get a Trackback link