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NowSMS Support Forums ⬆ NowSMS Support - SMS Issues ⬆ Archive through September 15, 2003 ⬆ |
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| Author | Message | |||
| D |
Hi Bryce, I have an enquery to make, I have been using Nowsms to send MMS to mobiles and I would like to fully understand the process of delivery of the MMS message. Correct me if I´m wrong, what happens is, when we (my Nowsms application) sends an mms notification, your server locates the mms message and converts it to WAP pages, and then sends a WAP push message to the receiver phone and the phone downloads it, is this correct?. Thank you in advance, regards. D | |||
| Bryce Norwood - NowSMS Support |
Hi D, It depends on how your are submitting the message to the gateway. There are two ways of submitting an MMS notification through the gateway, corresponding to the "Send MMS Message" and "Send MMS Notification" options in the web menu interface. When you use the "Send MMS Notification" option, you reference an existing URL that contains a binary format compiled MMS message. In this case, NowSMS merely validates that the MMS message has the correct MIME type and a valid MMS message header, and it then generates an MMS notification message to the mobile phone telling the mobile phone to retrieve the MMS message content directly from the URL that was provided. (The MMS notification message is encapsulated in a WAP push message that is sent over SMS.) When you use the "Send MMS Message" option, you are actually posting the content of the MMS message to the NowSMS server. If you've posted individual content files, NowSMS compiles them into a binary MMS message. It then generates an MMS notification message telling the mobile phone to retrieve the MMS content directly from a dynamically generated URL on the gateway itself. (And when the mobile device retrieves the message, we check its UAProf to determine what formats and image sizes are supported by the device, performing any necessary conversions before sending the message to the recipient device.) When a phone receives one of these MMS notification messages, the MMS client in the phone automatically initiates a data connection to retrieve the message (well, some phones have an option for the retrieval to be prompted instead of automatic). The MMS client is normally configured to connect to a particular GPRS APN and a particular WAP gateway IP address for MMS message retrieval. WAP Push doesn't really enter the equation, except in the sense that the MMS notification message is the content body of a WAP push message that is delivered over SMS. The WAP browser sees the MMS notification content type, and transfers the notification to the MMS client rather than handling it inside the WAP browser. Where WAP pages can enter the picture is that in the v4.20 release of the Now SMS/MMS Gateway, we introduced a "multimedia WAP push" function. The idea was that you could submit a message with content objects to the gateway using an approach similar to the way that you would submit an MMS message. However, the objects would be packaged and delivered as a WAP push to the WAP browser instead of as an MMS message. There were multiple purposes for this functionality. One purpose was that some types of content (like Java files) are better received through a WAP browser than an MMS client. The other purpose was that with quite a few operators having blocked MMS delivery from external MMSCs, we needed a good alternative option for multimedia message delivery. In the v5.0 release of the Now SMS/MMS Gateway, which is currently in beta testing (http://www.nowsms.com/beta5), we expanded some upon this concept. In addition to supporting direct MMS delivery via its built-in MMSC, the v5.0 release also supports connections to external MMSCs. Based upon recipient address masks, you can define different routings for how the gateway routes an MMS message. It can perform direct MMS delivery via the built-in MMSC; external routing via MM7, MM4, EAIF or MM1 (including MM1 over a GPRS modem); or it can automatically convert the MMS message to a multimedia WAP push message for delivery. (Note: At this time, in this MMS to multimedia WAP push conversion, we don't make any attempt to handle SMIL, only the individual objects are converted.) I'm not sure if I answered your question, or made it more confusing, so please feel free to ask for clarification if something is unclear. -bn | |||
