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MMS Arrives For the iPhone — Will It Crash AT&T's Network?
itwbennett writes "AT&T has said it is already seeing 'record traffic during peak hours of the night' with just the users selected for testing, and so it is 'very nervous' about the spike in traffic that it expects will occur after it launched MMS service for iPhones on Friday. Of course, setting records for MMS traffic isn't that great a feat considering that 'the service in question has been out for years on other handsets and hasn't exactly taken the mobile world by storm. In 2008, MMS made up just 2.5 percent of all messages sent from phones worldwide, meaning about 97.5 percent were SMS text messages, according to ABI Research. ABI expects the MMS share to grow to just 4.5 percent by 2014.' However, the carrier's fears in one respect may have been justified, says ABI analyst Dan Shey: 'Interoperability between carriers has always been an issue, and that's why MMS usage hasn't really taken off.'"
...it's their own damn fault. Considering how long mms has been around, and how long this has been mulled and they have had to prepare for this.
Not true in the US. I know many people who work at VZW and ones who work at ATT Wireless. The way the networks handle MMS is completely different. My friend on ATT can send me a pic or video, which comes in fine, when I go to forward to another VZW user it reports the MMS is too large.
Also, I can send a picture to a few people I know.. all but 1 is on VZW. The one who isn't is on ATT since that's who he's working for. Half of the time, all the VZW people will get it, but he will receive a MMS with nothing in it. On some occasions, it will happen when he MMS's a message to me.
I am glad that VZW->ATT and ATT->VZW texting has finally sped up. It use to take anywhere from 5 minutes to an hour for a text from my VZW phone to any one of my friends ATT phones to make it.
MMS just helps cell/mobile telcos perpetuate the myth that they're now anything other than mere purveyors of wireless data connectivity. The iPhone has done so much to help break this pattern, it'd be a shame to go backwards.
MMS Arrives For the iPhone
MMS arrived for the iphone with the release of 3.0, which happened months ago, which means most of us have had MMS for months now. it's just you american peasants who are newly getting it. headline should read, AT&T finally allows MMS on american iphones
MMS would have caught on with my friends a long time ago if it weren't so crippled by the phones that use it.
When I received an MMS on my old phone, I couldn't do anything with it but view it. I couldn't save it to my photo library, or set it as the wallpaper, forward the message, or anything, really. It was permanently attached to the SMS it came with, to either clog my inbox or be deleted. Thus, the useful functions of an MMS image are reduced to a) sending pictures of your drunk friends to other drunk friends and b) sending pictures penises to, well, anyone. With the ability of the iPhone to save an MMS photo to my photo roll, and from there send it by MMS or email to someone else, or edit it in an app, or later save it to my computer, I might actually use the MMS feature on occasion.
So, I feel that the crippled firmware of most phones is to blame for MMSes not catching on. Many of you will claim that the iPhone OS is likewise hobbled by Apple's tight controls, but if you think that the iPhone OS has it's hands tied by software/firmware, than normal phones are wrapped head to toe in duct tape, placed in cast iron sarcophaguses which are then welded shut, buried under several tons of concrete, and placed under armed guard for the rest of eternity.
Your mileage on phone OSes may vary. Prior to the iPhone, I used a Nokia flip phone that ran the default Cingular OS, whatever the hell that's called.
We can only hope.
For that matter it'll never got popular. This is partly because operators overprice MMS and because it doesn't really serve that much purpose.
Well, there are a couple of things that you got wrong here. First, overpriced or not, unlimited MMS is included as a part of the data plan you have to buy from AT&T when you have an iPhone. So cost won't matter.
The other is that one reason MMS hasn't taken off is that it's been hard to use on a lot of phones. On some of them the user has to know to go into a different messaging task, or to say create some kind of special message, and do some weird stuff they've never done before. On the iPhone, they added a little camera icon to the left of the text entry box. Couldn't be easier.
Since the "barriers to entry" have now been substantially lowered, iPhone users will indeed start to use the feature more.
John
Well, there are a couple of things that you got wrong here. First, overpriced or not, unlimited MMS is included as a part of the data plan you have to buy from AT&T when you have an iPhone. So cost won't matter.
No, actually, it's not. It was, back when the first iPhone came out, but now you're required to get a $30 data plan that includes no SMS or MMS messages. I pay for those at the a la carte rate of $.20 and $.30 each, respectively. If I sent more than 5 a month, I might consider an Messaging plan at an additional $5 to $30 a month, depending on which plan. But it's certainly NOT included in the price of the iPhone data plan.
First, overpriced or not, unlimited MMS is included as a part of the data plan you have to buy from AT&T when you have an iPhone.
Actually the US AT&T base iPhone data plan doesn't include SMS nor MMS. For $5 you can add 200 SMS/MMS. (I'm on the family plan)
I really don't see myself using MMS all that much -- after all, I've got a full-featured mobile email client. I have some younger relatives with cheapie feature phones that occasionally send us cameraphone snaps, though, and this will beat the crap out that horrible viewmymessage.com torture we had to go through before.
Are you kidding me? The phone that I've had for four years is not unusual - it is a bog standard Sony Ericsson model. It's had working MMS since I got it. I wouldn't describe it as hard to use. After taking a picture with the phone one of the menu options that pops up is send via mms. It works to the phones of everyone that I know, regardless of their network: O2, Orange, Vodafone, Three...
Are you sure that MMS not taking off is not more to do with the US having appalling infrastructure for mobile phones? It seems to work well enough everywhere else in the world...
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Wow if cell phone networks were open like the internet, there wouldn't be these types of problems.
FLR
Agreed. Companies today don't provide a service OR a product. They supply profits. Service and products are just the ugly, messy way of moving money from the bottom to the top of the financial pyramid.
Here, iPhones can send/receive MMS just fine for a long while already [....]
Since June 17th, 2009 -- approximately 3 months ago.
I was thinking that too. In Europe, *every* phone has MMS, with the possible exception of some older Blackberries which don't have cameras, and the "easy to use no frills phones" marketed to older people. I don't think there are any of those on the market at the moment.
Apple's recommendation if you can't get MMS working or don't want to upgrade is to continue to send pictures via email. It's pragmatic but not the best solution for immediate mobile to mobile picture transfers.
How much people really need an instant mobile to mobile picture transfer solution is a different question.
John
SMS needs no configuration as its built into the base GSM system as part of the control channel, GRPS builds on that and leave a lot of the config on the phone (DNS/DHCP), MMS is basically a special SMS (that the user will never see unless they use a very old phone in the GSM sense) that results in a download by GPRS from a carrier operated server...
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
The majority of phones that I have used required some special set up to use MMS and GPRS; usually sending a SMS to register for those services then receiving a message back containing automatically installing settings.
What happens when you "register for MMS" (either explicitly or implicitly by sending a MMS using the known settings) is that a MMSC (MMS Center, one of possibly many your carrier operates) is assigned to you (or rather, your Subscriber ID). Once that assignment is committed to the HLR database, incoming MMS for you will be forwarded tho that specific MMSC; without this assignment, you will only get a text message ("A MMS was received but we don't know how to reach you").
Sending a MMS is simply a "HTTP post" that uploads a "MMS Send request" (including your content as as MIME-Multipart Message) to the MMSC (Which then has to figure out how to forward it to the recipient(s) listed).
Receiving a MMS is the hard part: the MMSC sends a binary short message to your mobile, telling it "please fetch MMS at "http://$addr-of-mmsc/some-unique-but-hard-to-guess-id". (Insert lots of cursing about MMSC vendors whose software creates URLs so bloated that the Notification message gets longer than ~120 Bytes, causing it to be split into two SMS that need to be reassembled on them mobile).
If/When you decide to download the message
The MMS protocol contains a lot of functionality (message forwarding, permanent storage for messages, reverse charging, user selectable send/expiry times, ...) that never reached the customer. And with the limited features offered by the carriers (at premium prices nonetheless) MMS was dead in the water even before the advent of email-capable mobiles and "unlimited data" options.