Own an Android smartphone on T-Mobile, but no data plan and you want to web surf? There’s an app for that. Smozzy (in beta) acts as a wrapper around the standard Android browser, but cleverly redirects the traffic into SMS messages instead of a typical 2.5G, 3G, or 4G cellular data connection. Because T-Mobile offers free unlimited SMS/MMS texting packages, this amounts to free web access. How do they actually pull off this stunt? It turns out most web URLs are under the 160 character SMS limit, so they can be sent out without issues. If cookies need to be transmitted as well, they’re handled as additional outgoing SMSes. Receiving the content is where it gets more interesting. Smozzy runs an intermediate proxy server that fields the incoming website requests, downloads them, and then compresses the HTML, images, Javascript, and CSS into a ZIP file. The ZIP file is then encoded into a PNG image where each RGB pixel of the PNG corresponds to several bytes of the original ZIP archive. Lastly, the PNG file is split into as many pieces as necessary and sent out as MMS messages.
Of course, Smozzy has to reverse this whole process, which hurts performance compared to regular web browsing. Additionally, T-Mobile doesn’t prioritize SMS or MMS traffic on their towers. This results in a web page taking approximately 15–45 seconds to pull up, so far from a speedy experience. Still, one has to file this under the category of “amazing it works at all.” In fact, I wouldn’t be too quick to rely on this app, as there’s a good chance T-Mobile will begin blocking SMS/MMS content they identify as Smozzy’s, claiming it’s an improper use of their service.
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