World Report: The Big Picture of MMS Part II
By Niall McKay, Fri Jul 11 00:00:00 GMT 2003
Europe and the US need to think wireless - and avoid the word 'The Internet'.
In World Report: The Big Picture of MMS Part I
TheFeature.com reported on what services were available in Asia,
currently the home of the most advanced cellular services. Now, in Part
II we will have a look at what's going on in Europe and the US.
Western Europe has been a hotbed of picture-messaging
activity. Telenor of Norway launched the world’s first commercial MMS
service in March, and services have also been opened in Finland,
Germany, Hungary, Italy, and the UK, with most carriers planning to
offer services by the end of 2002. Pricing is all over the place, with
most carriers offering per-message rates that are at least 50% higher
than SMS charges, generally between EUR0.50 and 1, while some carriers
are offering flat-rate plans, such as T-Mobile UK’s GBP20 per month plan
that lets users send up to 10MB worth of messages. Most carriers have,
however, offered introductory periods letting users try out the service
for no charge.
The high price of the required enhanced handsets
may have an impact on the uptake of the services, with SonyEricsson T68
prices varying from EUR300-500, depending on carrier subsidies. Telecom
Italia Mobile, in keeping with their policy of not subsidizing handsets,
plans to sell the Nokia 7650 for EUR 699 (although they will throw in
EUR 20 worth of free calls…). Certainly in the run-up to Christmas there
will be frenetic action among carriers to launch their services and have
a wide array of MMS-compatible handsets for sale in time for the
gift-buying season.
But European carriers still face two big
hurdles to MMS success: reaching a critical mass of users, and
interconnection agreements. The pricey handsets mentioned above, and the
fact that MMS isn’t backwards-compatible with SMS means that until a
good number of subscribers have enabled handsets, person-to-person
traffic won’t take off. This should put the onus on carriers to push for
enhanced messaging content, the first type of which will likely be news
or sports stories with pictures added. But it also means carriers must
push the ways in which enhanced messages can be shared with
non-subscribers, currently through Web-based albums or via an e-mail or
standard SMS in which the recipient is directed to a Web address that
holds the message.
Interconnection also remains a headache at
this early stage. While it should be possible to use MMS services
wherever a carrier has a GPRS roaming agreement, the only commercial MMS
interconnection agreement in the world has been signed by Finland’s
Sonera and the Hong Kong carrier CSL. It’s even unclear at this point if
a message sent from say, a T-Mobile Germany subscriber to a T-Mobile UK
user will get there. Until messages can be sent across carriers within
the same country, usage will remain low.
US
As with most other wireless
technologies, the US is lagging a bit with picture messaging services,
but the arrival of GPRS and 1x networks has narrowed the gap between the
States and the rest of the world.
AT&T Wireless has
launched its m-mode service on the SonyEricsson T68, and plans to soon
offer the same digital camera attachment available to consumers
elsewhere in the world (the camera is already available from third-party
vendors on the Web for around $150). But the carriers’ GPRS network only
functions in about 30 cities across the country, and there’s been no
word on when the picture messaging services will be available, though
it’s rumored the carrier will offer the SonyEricsson P800 hybrid with a
built-in camera in the third quarter.
But more exciting is the
exego application from US developer Summus, available from Verizon
Wireless on their 1x “Express” network that utilizes Qualcomm’s BREW
platform to allow for the downloading of applications. Although it’s a
powerful application that makes it much more than just a rival to MMS,
Verizon is showing off exego as a photo-sharing app.
Users
upload their digital images to an exego Web account, then log on to that
account with the application that resides in their mobile device. They
can then send the images to other exego mobile users, and quickly at
that thanks to the massive compression exego uses. They can also use
their Web account to make their images public or add captions, sounds,
or other effects to their picture messages. What makes exego so
interesting is its compression technology – Summus says it can be used
to send images over data links as slow as 4 kbits/second – which makes
it a suitable transmission technology for wireless multimedia data, not
necessarily a rival to such
services.
Don't Mention the
Web
So about the success of the technology? Well if
Japan is anything to go by – and it usually is in the consumer
electronics business – then there is little doubt that the MMS will
become a major success. The question is when? Certainly, so far, both
Europe and the US are making two major mistakes. Firstly, they are
trying to market the technology, not the applications. MMS, for example,
is not a phrase that Japanese subscribers are familiar with, although
virtually every cell phone subscriber can send and receive multimedia
messages. Secondly, when European and US providers do eventually get
around to mentioning the applications they talk in terms of an Internet
experience - typically, e-mailing and web browsing. Japanese operators
are not that foolish. For example, Wireless Access Protocol, so much the
failure in Europe, is the underlying technology used for content
services in Japan. But the Japanese don't try and compete with the
Internet experience. They sell services like sending a text messages,
looking up a train timetable, or sending a photograph to a friend. And
rightly so, after all, mobile phones can’t compete with computers when
it comes to email browsing in the same way as they can’t compete with
cameras when it comes to taking photos.