MMS sneaks up in the outside lane, finally

by: admin Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007

Rating: are operators ready?
By Annie Turner

Long, long after the hype died down, MMS is making ground stealthily.
According to Portio Research, MMS traffic worldwide doubled from 13.9
billion messages in 2005 to 27.26 billion in 2006.

Airwide reckons this volume will continue to increase, fuelled by an
increasing number of applications application to person (A2P), person to
application (P2A), person to person (P2P).

The question is, are operators ready for the increase? Experience would
suggest not (the SMS boom caught most of them with their trousers round
their ankles) and Airwide argues that most of them are only geared up for
P2P MMS, but that the other two are going to be increasingly important to
marketing and advertising campaigns. We agree.

The company also reckons that poor handling of MMS traffic will inhibit its
growth and irritate users. Not to mention ticking off advertisers and other
potential sources of revenue, obviously.

Airwide is stepping into the breach with new products for operators, to
enable them to cash in on the long awaited MMS bonanza. See

2 Responses to “MMS sneaks up in the outside lane, finally”

Philippe J DEWOST Said:

Interesting enough, when you check the published Verizon Q1 results, which detail how many data users they have and how many MMS have been sent and received, you end up with approx 2 MMS sent per user and per month on average…

There is still big room for improvement there !

We at Realeyes3D think that content is key, and that the key to MMS is in applications that will unlock and simplify compelling MMS content creation.

Like Digitizer™ (think of a wireless Post-It™ note) and w-Postcard, that can help subscribers generate compelling content right from their handset.

– Philippe DEWOST
VP Marketing
Realeyes3D

Comment made on May 3rd, 2007 at 5:50 pm

annie turner Said:

I couldn’t agree more that there is huge room for improvement, still it is progress and I think MMS is reaching the point where users are going to become much more creative with its use – after all, they’ve only just become convinced that the technology works at all after so many teething troubles.