| Open and Closed UK MMS Access |  Search
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NowSMS Support Forums ⬆ MMS & SMS Technical Discussions (unsupported) ⬆ Archive through March 23, 2004 ⬆ |
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| Author | Message | |||
| Paul Winter Unregistered guest |
Hi All (but probably Bruce....), My question is: Does anyone have any knowledge or ideas on wether Orange and Tmobile will open their MMS access or if it will go the other way and Voda and O2 close theirs?? I know that you can use NowMMS to send MMS notifiers to phones on Voda and O2 to pick up the mms from an 'external' URL, and that to get it to work on Orange and Tmobile you need to reconfigure the phone to use a WAP access point instead. I just wonder if the networks have thought about this and if there's a plan to go one way or the other - at the moment we have 2 doing each!! If it gets opened then its easy for 3rd party suppliers, so possibly more revenue. Closed is more control for the networks... Any thoughts / insider knowledge appreciated!! cheers, paul. | |||
| Bryce Norwood - NowSMS Support Board Administrator Username: Bryce Post Number: 1563 Registered: 10-2002 |
Paul, In most European countries, I would say that the model is more closed than open. I don't think the decision is driven so much by considerations related to content providers as it is related to the billing models. Outside of the US, the general model for mobile phones has been that it is free to receive an SMS, but it costs money to send an SMS. (Similarly, the caller is charged for calling a mobile phone, and it is free to receive a call on a mobile phone unless roaming.) When deploying their MMS setups, many operators were of the opinion that the same should apply to MMS. Considering the way that MMS works, the only way to facilitate this is to setup a separate GPRS access point for MMS, and not to charge for traffic on that access point. Of course, if you do that, you have to limit what can go through that access point otherwise clever users will figure out that they can have free GPRS. So the MMS access points typically connect into a private network with only a WAP gateway and an MMSC, and no other external access. In the UK, Vodafone and O2 figure that any GPRS traffic related to MMS would be relatively insubstantial, and could just be counted against a plan that included x MB, so they used their existing WAP access points and infrastructure to also handle the MMS traffic. So far, I haven't seen much initiative for change on either front. I've heard rumours that Vodafone is pushing for phones to support "white lists" for where they will accept WAP push and MMS notifications from. Thankfully, all efforts that I have seen in this direction have at least included the ability for settings messages to be sent to the phone to allow users to add to these "white lists". -bn | |||
