Laugh? I nearly had therapy.
Back in July ‘07 Vodafone UK implemented the Novarra transcoder. One of the functions of this transcoder is to replace the user-agent string in every HTTP request with a generic “Mozilla…” one.
Ok, so what?
Well, we, and a very large number of other mobile-savvy web players, use the user-agent information to tell our servers what type of device our customer is using so that we can deliver an appropriately optimised version of our pages: small-footprint, easily navigated XHTML-MP to phones, full blown HTML with Javascript to desktops, etc.
By stripping the user-agent from the originator’s request and replacing it with the generic signature used by desktop browsers, our servers were fooled into thinking that everyone coming in via the Vodafone mobile pipe was on a desktop – exactly what Vodafone and Novarra intended.
And why did they hatch such a cunning plan? Probably because Vodafone UK sees the prospect of millions of customers visiting free desktop orientated sites on mobile phones as a way to drive data revenues – a vision with a blind spot: most desktop sites don’t scale well visually or technically to resource constrained mobile devices leading to very poor user experiences.
Not only that; operators cream off generous chunks of the earnings that third-party mobile-aware sites make from selling subscriptions and content such as ringtones and wallpapers, so by making it difficult for these services to operate as autonomous mobile-aware sites, Vodefone is damaging its own revenues.
And now? Well, we took a number of steps to protect our users and overcome this somewhat cavalier attitude to unilaterally redefining how the web works, including: (i) we gave desktop users the ability to switch manually between “desktop” and “PDA” views; and (ii) with support from bigger guns than us at Bango, we had ourselves whitelisted so that the Novarra transcoder passes our traffic through unmolested.
And why am I ranting on about this now, 10 months after the event?
Well, it was this interview with Novarra in “Mobile Marketing Magazine” which reignited my indignation – have a read, then note the volume of comments at the end!
We particularly enjoyed the reference to domains ending in .WAP as being passed through unchanged by the Novarra transcoder, a TLD that doesn’t even exist!
Priceless!
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Posted by squidblog 