My question is about hosting small personal websites which doesn’t have a heavy traffic.
The biggest reasons why we (standard PC users) are paying for web hosting services are (please correct me if I’m wrong):
- We don’t keep our PCs turned on all the time.
- Some/most of us don’t have static IP addresses.
However, the modern cell phones are nothing but small PCs which are kept open all the time. If they also can have static IP addresses, why couldn’t we be able to install a web server on them?
Is this technology available currently?
If yes, how widely is it used at the moment? And, when is it going to win against classical remote paid web servers?
If no, when and how is it going to be available? What hardware (cell-phone type) are we going to need to use it?
You can already get a web server which runs on your SIM card called the Smartcard Web Server (SCWS) if you have a GSM phone. It runs in a part called the SIM application Toolkit which is a really cool area of your SIM card for running services. The web server is part of the OMA (Open Mobile Alliance) specifications so most (if not all) latest SIM cards support it.
The web server can serve static and dynamic web pages and you can also run some Java applets.
The problem is that this was designed for your mobile operator to serve web pages to your handset and not really for someone to remotely connect to your SIM to view content. For example here in the UK O2 use this technology to provide a nice interface to o2 extra features on my phone. I can select from a HTML menu of traffic, football etc and then once I drill down through the small site running on my SIM card I get to a link which takes me off to a deep-linked site on the main o2 site.
I think there is a way to enable the SCWS to be public facing as there was a press release by Axalto (now Gemalto) in 2005 where they stated they have a SIM card running a personal blog for the user and the user could take a picture on their phone, press a button to decide to publish it on his/her blog. Then his/her friends can have immediate access to it from a PC or a mobile phone.
If you work out how to remotely view the SCWS then the next problem is how to write the files to your SIM card. Traditionally you would need some sort of SIM card reader/writer which use the ADPU protocol to talk to the card. However the mobile network who issued your SIM have remote access to the SCWS files on your SIM by issuing commands over the air to your SIM. This means there’s a way to remotely update the files and after a bit of digging I think the security is based on a pre-shared key. Once you have the pre-shared key you can SMS your own handset with a type of SMS called an Over The Air SMS which re-programs the SIM to store new files for your web server. I can let you know the way to get your pre-shared key if you send me a direct message.
So in summary:
Is this technology available currently? – Sort of. You can run a web server on your SIM card and if you can open this to your public IP then you can run a web server straight from the SIM to the public.
How widely is it used at the moment? The operators use this quite a lot all over the world to serve you a slightly better value added service on your phone. I have never heard of anyone except Gemalto using this to serve public pages.
When is it going to win against classical remote paid web servers? That’s a tough question. If you can get SCWS to work for public access then the next stage is an easy way to publish to the SIM. Once there’s an easy way to publish to the SIM how do you get some sort of DNS system running as your phone is issued a dynamic IP from your network.
What hardware (cell-phone type) are we going to need to use it? Because this runs on the SIM and not the phone it is fully handset hardware independent, however SCWS is only available on more recent SIM cards (and not CDMA handsets).
More info here: http://smartcardwebserver.com/ and a good overview of how it works from Gemalto.
Probably a good idea to read through the Resources section of the SIMalliance SCWS Working Group