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NowSMS Support Forums ⬆ NowSMS Support - SMS Issues ⬆ Archive through September 15, 2003 ⬆ |
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| Author | Message | |||
| ha |
Hi, Have you discovered any issues receiving MMS notification via GPRS cards, in UK or elsewhere? I have heard that some operators are forwarding the MMS notification as a standard SMS (with a link to view the MMS message with a standard browser) based on the device's IMEI and/or UAProf. The IMEI of a GPRS card is likly not listed as MMS capable (UAProf make some sense). A contribution was recently submitted to 3GPP to propose this. However I suspect that some operators are already doing this or something similiar. | |||
| Bryce Norwood - NowSMS Support |
I don't doubt that someone has made this suggestion to the 3GPP ... lots of people make suggestions. Of course, some stupid suggestions make it into standards, but this doesn't make sense. It would be too anti-competitive ... not so much an issue for GPRS cards, but more of an issue for upstart handset vendors ... also an issue for PDA phones which might have an add-on MMS client. It couldn't happen at a UAProf level, because UAProf is transmitted over WAP, so at this time, you can't query UAProf based upon IMEI (unless it has been cached on the system somewhere, or there is a table that the operator has which maps device model to a UAProf, which is possible, but anti-competitive against upstart vendors). I can tell you what I have observed on different operator MMS implementations ... Many have a database of subscribers (phone numbers) and a flag for whether or not the subscriber has MMS access. MMS needs to be enabled on your account in order to send/receive MMS through the operator MMSC. Some automatically enable MMS access for a phone number the first time that the phone sends an MMS message through the operator MMSC. (I observed this on a T-Mobile SIM in the US.) Some send an MMS notification first, and if the message is not retrieved within a certain amount of time, they send an SMS link to a URL. Some just send an MMS notification regardless. I have heard rumours of an operator in Germany (don't know which one, as this sounds like a rumour to me) which is somehow doing some automatic detection based upon the type of phone that a SIM is presently in. If this is true, I don't know how this effects GPRS modems. I don't believe it is possible to determine whether a phone has MMS support without a lookup table of some sort. If there is an operator that is actually doing a real time determination, I suspect they are basing their lookup on whether or not the phone supports GPRS, as that could be done without a lookup table. If there is discussion about a new way for a device to indicate that it supports MMS when it connects to the network, then that's another story. GPRS modems would need to do something to support this, just as handset vendors would have to ... and then there would be the issue of legacy handsets. At this point, I'd say it's too late to implement something like this ... it would have been a good idea to do it from the start. Maybe it could be a feature for the 3G standard, but it's too late for GPRS. -bn | |||
