Clarification of MMS costs

Clarification of MMS costs SearchSearch
Author Message
simonc
Posted on Thursday, June 26, 2003 - 10:21 am:   

Hi - downloaded the free trial yesterday and was trying it out. Was just wondering if I understand the process for forwarding/sending MMS correctly...

Say Bob sends an MMS using my gateway to Sue - Bob's phone basically opens up a WAP connection to the MMSC running on my computer and deposits the MMS there. The gateway then sends an MMS notification message to Sue's mobile which then initiates another WAP connection to the MMSC to download the message.

Is that basically the way it works? So the charges would be:

1. Bob is charged at WAP rates for depositing the message
2. I am charged an SMS charge for sending an MMS notification to Sue
3. Sue is charged at WAP rates for retreiving the message

Presumably the notification is charged at my normal operator SMS rate? (whether it is being sent via gsm modem or other means).

Thanks
Bryce Norwood - NowSMS Support
Posted on Thursday, June 26, 2003 - 04:31 pm:   

Simon,

Yes, that is correct.

The only consideration that I would add is that usually it takes 2 SMS messages to generate an MMS notification message.

You didn't ask about this. But since we get asked about this issue of having 2 SMS messages to generate a single MMS notification from time to time, I'll also mention a few tricks here that I don't think I've mentioned on the discussion board previously.

You can fit most MMS notifications down to a single SMS message if you do the following:

1.) Make sure your MMSC is on port 80 (reduces the size of the notification URL).

2.) Use the shortest possible domain name for the DNS name of your MMSC. (Examples of good short names: mms.to, now.ws, ihub.com. An IP address can work, but you want it to be as few characters as possible.)

3.) In the MMSC.INI file, add the following settings under the [MMSC] section header:

CompactMMSURL=Yes
MMSNotificationNoSubject=Yes

4.) Unfortunately, MMS messages coming in from e-mail will still be forced into multiple SMS messages for the notification if the sender has a long e-mail address, because the sender address gets included in the notification. You can exclude the sender from the notification with the following setting:

MMSNotificationNoSender=Yes

However, beware ... some phones will ignore messages with no sender in the notification (I believe we noticed this with either the Sharp GX-1 or GX-10 ... some other phones only ignore these messages if they are configured not to allow anonymous messages). And some other phones will not let you reply to messages where the sender was not included in the notification (even though the phone identifies the sender from the message itself). We've noticed this behaviour with the SonyEricsson T68i.

So basically, use this latter setting only in special controlled circumstances.

-bn
simonc
Posted on Thursday, June 26, 2003 - 08:51 pm:   

Thank you for a very comprehensive reply! Some great tips there which should hopefully come in very handy.