The largest US mobile carrier, Verizon Wireless has started funneling traffic between Verizon feature phones and the web through a transcoder from Novarra. Verizon calls the service "Optimized View" and has added promotional information and a FAQ to their customer website There is also a page on the carrier's developer site which has links to a opt-out form and to a PDF document detailing the rules that the transcoder uses to determine which sites to transcode.
Given the disastrous effects that VodaFone's UK roll-out of Novarra had on mobile sites and services, I'm rather apprehensive about this. In the PDF, Verizon/Novarra say that they won't change the User Agent header or transcode sites that have submitted an opt-out request or have a URL corresponding to one of these patterns:
*.mobi, m.*, mobile.*, avantango.*, wap.*, iphone.*, <domain>/m/*, <domain>/mobile/*, pda.*, wireless.*, wml.*, xhtml.*, <domain>/m/, <domain>/gmm/, <domain>/portable
For sites that have not opted out or do not use one of the mobile URL patterns, the transcoder will change the User Agent and a number of other headers to ones mimicking a desktop browser. However the site will not be transcoded if it meets any of the following conditions:
I don't have a Verizon account but I did do some limited testing in a Verizon store. I used a Motorola V950 which runs the Openwave 6 browser. I mostly tested my own sites. The transcoder seems to follow the rules in the PDF. None of my sites that use a mobile URL pattern, Doctype or no-transform were transcoded. A couple of test pages I created as copies of mobile pages but with none of the Novarra trigger conditions where transcoded even though they were under 10KB.
I didn't really test the quality of the transcoded pages but noticed that a two line navigation bar is added to the top and bottom of the page and pagination is used. I thought the transcoded version of howardforums.com was reasonably usable, but my test sites, which were under 10KB, were needlessly split into two pages.
According to Verizon, the transcoder does offer users the ability to view the original version of any transcoded page by clicking a "Turn off Optimization" link in the bottom navigation
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posted by Dennis Bournique
November 13, 2008 @ 1:08 pm
7 View Comments
