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NowSMS Support Forums ⬆ MMS & SMS Technical Discussions (unsupported) ⬆ Archive through August 08, 2004 ⬆ |
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| Author | Message | |||
| Mr Case Unregistered guest |
Hi, We are using the push method for delivering an MMS. It works great except for handsets on the Orange network. I understand they block 3rd party MMS messages. Does anyone know if 1) they plan to open this up 2) If this is legal | |||
| Craig Dunn New member Username: Capitext Post Number: 3 Registered: 06-2004 |
They do not 'block third party MMSs' per se. Wap Push and MMS are (technically) seperate. The former is using Wap Push to get the phone to initiate a WAP session to an external URL to pull off MMS content from a WAP Gateway. This works with Vodafone, TMobile and o2 in the UK. Orange and 3, whilst allowing the push message to go through, restrict the subscribers ability to pull the MMS content from external sources. 'Real' MMS sends an MMS message directly to the operator. If you have the facility (either yourself or with a 3rd party service provider), you can reach an Orange handset by sending it to a direct connection. The downside of this is that any messages that have to go 'off-net' incur internetworking fee's from the operator, and this can become a fairly expensive method of sending MMS. To answer your other point - there is nothing illegal about what Orange do. Regards -- Craig craig@capitext.com http://www.capitext.com | |||
| Jack Bull Unregistered guest |
Can you do content transformation with a direct connection (I guess you are talking MM7?) - with the SMS push you can get the user_agent and make it all look pretty. How do you know it's not illegal? I would have thought it might be a contender for anti-competetive behaviour under the UK competition act. | |||
| Matthew Rahman New member Username: Mrahman Post Number: 6 Registered: 11-2003 |
As Craig mentioned, you can deliver to Orange subscribers directly by using an MM1 connection over a GPRS modem, as opposed to sending an MMS Notification and downloading the MMS from the NowSMS box. But because the NowSMS box is simply sending the MMS as if it was a mobile phone, the content transcoding is performed by the recipient's MMSC. Essentially, Orange are preventing third-party MMS providers from delivering to their subscribers; they're quite happy to accept the SMS interconnect fee for the MMS Notifications to the phones, but will then display an error to the user when the phone tries to retrieve the message. You can, however, make an agreement with Orange to deliver to their subscribers through their MMS interface, as of a recently, but this is costly to set up, and, according to one of my contacts within Orange, they are only interested in organisations that are going to deliver large volumes of MMS traffic. Of course, the main reason why MMS, and in particular Application-to-User MMS, has not taken off is because no-one can deliver to Orange - effectively 25% of subscribers. Absolutely no good for marketing related activities for a start. Surely they would be pleased with the extra binary SMS and GPRS traffic generated by 3rd party apps - we all know SMS took off once interconnect and cross-network short codes were in place, for example. Four years ago or so, UK operators were slapped on the wrist for putting walled-gardens around their WAP networks, which was in breach of an EU directive, and so they had to take these down. This is why WAP Push is now so popular and why the content market has mushroomed. However delivering content using MMS is often a better method - especially when DRM is required, because some phones only accept locked content downloaded within an MMS. In my opinion, an MMS Notification is a binary message very similar to a WAP Push, and the WAP/GPRS bearer is used to download MMS messages from an external server in the same way content is downloaded from a WAP Push link. Therefore, the only reason why Orange prevent MMS downloads from servers outside of their network is purely commercial. So are they acting illegally? I'm no lawyer, but I'm finding it difficult to see the difference between this scenario and the WAP issues of years back! I just hope the other operators can put some presssure on Orange to open this up - and not go the other way and join them, as I fear may happen. OK, so I'm off the soap box now! | |||
