Vodacom "broke the Internet"

Rudolph Muller

Rudolph Muller is the editor at MyBroadband and covers telecoms and broadband news. Rudolph comes from an academic background, but left the University of...

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Vodacom clients are up in arms following the company’s recent announcement that it had improved the Internet experience for cellphone users. The company’s new service was intended to reformat traditional website pages for the smaller screens of mobile devices.

What Vodacom has done, say many users, is effectively "break the Internet". And the South African chapter of the Internet Society agrees. The organisation issued a statement on Friday saying that "this [move] came without any warning and ISOC-ZA is united against this sort of behaviour".

Vodacom said last week that its "Mobile Internet service will ensure an accurate representation of the Internet on a cellphone, through technology that adapts the computer-screen format of any website into a smaller, cellphone-friendly format."

In doing so, however, Vodacom appears to have made portions of the Internet unavailable to users. In its statement, the Internet Society said that "various applications that include instant messaging, banking, specialised mobile applications such as email, Youtube, Twitter, Fring and at least a dozen others, are no longer working.

"In technical terms, Vodacom installed a proxy service that was not sufficiently tested," the organisation said.

One of the workarounds to solve the problem is for users to bypass the proxy server that is set by default on the handset.

Users on the MyBroadband forum point out that while the workaround does work in most cases this is not the ideal solution for most users. One forum member wrote: "I’m still a bit concerned that this is going to be tricky to explain to the average user – who won’t have the confidence to go and edit their access points."

Standards

The Internet Society also said in it statement that the "technology that Vodacom is using is not standards compliant and, considering Vodacom’s position as a dominant ISP, it should behave in a more responsible fashion. Furthermore, some of our members have claimed that Vodacom block many applications that it feels may threaten its business. While we have no direct evidence of this, we appeal to Vodacom to disclose what it blocks and intercepts on its networks."

Other users, however, have pointed out that not only does the new Vodacom service make many websites unusable, but the service also inserts "navigation" bars into the top and bottom of the screen. According to Vodacom these bars are intended to be used for navigating between the top and the bottom of the screen, linking to a Google search or to provide a link to Vodafone Live.

A number of users, however, are less than happy with the banners, saying they could be seen as potential advertising. One user on the FMTech Forum said: "Personally I think Vodacom knows exactly what it is doing – by converting all websites being accessed through them they add "navigation bars" to the top and bottom. Normal people would call this ‘Advertising’. What makes it worse is that Vodacom has now acquired advertising on websites that it did not pay for (nor asked permission for)."

Vodacom mobile surfing discussion