MMS to replace texts as mobile money spinner

Multimedia messaging service (MMS) is rapidly taking over from short messaging service (SMS), but operators must undertake major infrastructure upgrades to cope with the technology's increased traffic demands or risk alienating customers with poor service.

According to the analyst Yankee Group, MMS will become the leading messaging revenue generator for mobile operators by 2008, fuelled by an explosion in global cameraphone sales.

Yankee Group's European Wireless Mobile Data Application Forecast predicts that MMS will become a core revenue generator for operators as they increasingly push entertainment offerings based on event-driven application-to-person (A2P) MMS alert services.

But delivering such services will place existing infrastructures under stress as A2P MMS generates spiky traffic patterns.

"The wireless industry is still in the early stages of providing multimedia-based services," said XJ Wang, Yankee Group senior analyst, in a statement.

"We strongly believe there is a need to separate the P2P and A2P MMS traffic to ensure good user experiences. An insufficient MMS infrastructure will hamper services, and early adopters will not hesitate to abandon a poor service.

"The failure of early Wap service should be a valuable lesson for launching multimedia-based services."

The analyst firm also predicted that multimedia-based entertainment services will become the top entertainment service revenue generator for mobile providers in 2005, surpassing text-based and browser-based entertainment services.

See also:

Latest Trojan delivers SMS spam payload

Delf-HA Trojan sends junk text messages to mobile phones  10 Nov 2004

Like this story? Spread the news by clicking below:

 del.icio.us     Digg this     reddit!