Handset, system makers unite on multimedia messaging

The world's largest mobile phone manufacturers and three suppliers of mobile messaging systems have agreed on how to build the road ahead to Multimedia Message Service. The technology will be sold as the successor to the popular Short Message Service.

"We needed to stop MMS from diverging into three or four directions. Some saw MMS with a focus on e-mail; others thought it would be a carrier for unified messaging. It has been agreed that MMS will be the evolution of SMS text messaging," said Fergus Murphy, head of product management at the mobile networks division of Logica.

Handset makers and messaging system vendors Nokia, Motorola, Siemens and L.M. Ericsson Monday sent out a statement together with software and systems developers CMG, Comverse Technology, and Logica, stating the united support for MMS as the next version of SMS.

If an application other than SMS had been chosen as a base for MMS, the user interface would have been different, resulting in something new for the user to learn.

"It took over 7 years for SMS to take off. We want to stick with the user paradigm of SMS, as we now have educated users out there. MMS, like SMS, is about person-to-person communication, not about person-to-e-mailbox-somewhere-on-a-server communication," said Fredrik Oijer, strategic product manager at Ericsson.

MMS, due out in mobile handsets later this year, will allow users to send multimedia messages from one mobile phone to another. The size of MMS messages is theoretically unlimited. SMS only supports plain-text messages that can't be any longer than 160 characters.

The underlying technology for both services is completely different, according to Oijer.

"SMS uses the SMS bearer, one of the signaling channels on the network, whilst MMS is bearer independent. Ericsson will use [Wireless Application Protocol] to send MMS messages," he said.

MMS will work best on a packet-switched mobile network such as General Packet Radio Service networks and 3G networks, but also works on the circuit-switched Global System for Mobile Communication networks, according to Oijer.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.