Friday, March 28, 2008
Tmobile: when the pipe becomes too dumb
As you might know, I believe mobile operators are all destined to become pipes. They are a voice pipe today, after all, and they will be a data pipe shortly as well. They simply do not own content or any user content. The content owner will deliver the services, not the operators.One example is in mobile email. Everyone thought the carrier would win, because they are the gate keeper. Wrong. The gate is not between you and your email provider. The gate is in the hands of your email provider. They have the content (your email). They can decide not to serve it to the mobile operator (or gouge them for it). Eventually, market forces will push mobile operators towards open data plans, and the power will shift to email providers (ISPs and portals).
Some days, however, I get surprised how a potential dumb pipe can become too dumb. In the last few days, we started getting reports that syncs on Tmobile stopped working. From people that bought a data plan. Same phone with an at&t SIM card worked. Put a Tmobile SIM card in and it would not work (actually, it was worst, sync with native SyncML clients were giving false positives...).
After some analysis, we found the issue. All of a sudden, Tmobile is chopping off the word jsessionid from the URLs. That is what native SyncML clients use to keep track of the session. If you chop it off, the sync can't work.
Now, there are two options:
- they did it on purpose, to block some application they do not like. Certainly it is not sync, but I just can't see what it could be (Google and Yahoo apps work... They are the enemy, right?)
- they did it by mistake, putting in the network a new gateway that has a bug or a feature they did not know about
If this is the case, we are facing a case of a dumb pipe which is a bit too dumb. That is a scary thought... Let me count on market forces to fix it. It always works like this...
Posted by Fabrizio at 09:35
3 Comments:
This is the best so far!
It is a bit like killing mobile devices supporting IMAP IDLE for push-mail by setting arbitrary timeouts to kill connections. But "better".
It looks like you just can not win while working with the operators/carriers :-/
I honestly wish they get to this century before it is too late (for them).
Comment Posted at 13:29
Donald C. Kirker said...
Sprint did something similar to this. I guess they are slowly setting up Openwave's OpenWeb. It seems that the proxy was overtaking all HTTP traffic and causing some things to fail. At least, the reports I heard stated that web pages failed to load and media streaming stopped working for some.
The problem with this is it leads to customer confusion as well. Everybody wanted to start mucking around deep within the cell network settings of the phone without understanding the consequences.
Comment Posted at 00:08
Kevin said...
It seems like this was a slow roll out. I initially had this issue on port 80, but, moving to port 8080 on the SyncML server solved it. Now port 8080 is also infected with this issue. Luckily I have been able to move to an SSL connection via https and that seems to have solved the issue at least for now.
I really can't believe how badly T-Mobile is failing its business and high end customers. I spend over $100 for service on my Blackberry a month. Then to have T-Mobile say "We do not support third party applications." Crap, you don't even support legitimate use of what I have paid for.
Needless to say I am now talking to AT&T about moving my service.
