A new project has emerged that’s hoping to deliver Internet access to the developing world via text messages (SMSs) alone.

The idea probably sounds a little absurd to those of us in the developed world who’re more concerned with streaming movies on our iPhones. But while mobile phones are common pretty much everywhere these days, not all networks in the world are up to speed. More to the point, in many parts of the globe (think Africa etc), there aren’t any fixed networks to speak of at all – which means mobile access is all there is.

Which is why the Cosmos Browser project isn’t such a bad idea at all: It’s an application that allows users to access the web over SMS. According to Stefan Aleksic of ColdSauce, which is leading the project, browsing the web over SMS works as follows:

Firstly, the user types in the desired URL into the Cosmos app, which sends a text to ColdSauce’s Twillio number. That text is then forwarded as a reguler POST request to ColdSauce’s Node.js backened.

From there, “the backend takes the URL, gets the HTML source of the website, minifies it, gets rid of the CSS, javascrip and images, GZIP compresses it, encodes it in Base64, and sends the data as a series of SMSes,” explains Aleksic.

The texts are rapid-fired back to the phone at a rate of three per second – once all the data is received, the app decompresses the data and displays it in a readable text format.

All in all it’s a very painless solution for those using super-slow networks. Aleksic explains that SMS messages can carry up to 140 characters which translates into 1,120 bytes per message. Cosmos can send three texts per second, which means a bitrate of 3.36 Kbps. That’s about 60 percent faster than the original 2400 baud modems the developed world was using in the early days of the web.

photo credit: Steve Webel via photopin cc