Picture messaging soon to be available across three national carriers

Picturing, video and other multimedia messaging services (MMS) will get a major boost in the very near future. The wireless carriers and the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association (CWTA) are putting the finishing touches on opening up the MMS gateways, setting the stage for the introduction of inter-carrier MMS. The move was announced earlier this year in a CWTA news release, and there are now reports that an official announcement could be coming in the very near future. Marc Choma, director of communications for the CWTA, says there are still some elements of the system that need to be ironed out. "We really want to make sure all of the testing is complete before we make that public," he tells Report on Wireless, referring to a pending announcement. An exact date on the announcement has yet to be determined, but Choma says it will be in the "near future." Inter-carrier picture and video messaging follows a similar industry initiative when the then four national wireless operators got together more than three years ago to implement inter-carrier text messaging (RoW, Nov. 13/01). The four carriers worked with CMG to bring inter-carrier SMS into the mainstream in Canada, a service that officially went live in Canada in the spring of 2001 (RoW, April 16/02). It’s still unclear at this point how soon inter-carrier MMS will be announced, but it would certainly be a shot in the arm to the service that allows subscribers to send pictures, video clips and other multimedia content to each other. In the months that followed inter-carrier short messaging services (SMS), text messaging traffic shot up dramatically. Recent figures from the CWTA reveal that Canadian wireless subscribers sent more than 710 million person-to-person text messages from their handsets in 2004. This level is approximately double the level of 352 million sent in 2003 and about 300% higher than the 174 million text messages sent from cell phones in 2002. For the month of February 2005 alone, there were 95.5 million text messages sent or more than 3.4 million per day. If the SMS paradigm holds true, then the wireless carriers are set to reap the rewards of a huge revenue windfall. SMS has been one of the key drivers behind growth of the wireless data services’ portion of overall average revenue per user (ARPU). See article on pages 1 and 2 for more details of major wireless data services revenue drivers. Canadians are already sending picture messages to friends and family subscribing to the same carrier, but now that reach is nearly tripled when subscribers of all three carriers can send and receive multimedia messages. Just as most handsets in the market in 2002 were capable of sending and receiving text messages, there is a rapidly increasing number of camera phones in the hands of consumers. According to figures presented by Tomi Ahonen, a wireless industry consultant and author, at the Wireless Connections 2005 conference in Calgary last month, the number of camera phones in the world in 2004 was estimated to be 169 million. This, he says, means that in three years since the introduction of camera phones, the number of them shipped into the market has surpassed that of traditional digital cameras. Expansion of inter-carrier MMS south of the border Despite inter-carrier MMS not yet being available in Canada, there is a good chance that the service will be expanded to include wireless operators in the United States. Just as the Canadian and American carriers opened up text messaging to cross the borders, it is expected that the same will be done for MMS. Bell Mobility and Sprint PCS launched inter-carrier picture messaging services last year (RoW, March 10/04).

Picture messaging soon to be available across three national carriers

News | 06/03/2005 4:00 am EDT

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