OXFORD, United Kingdom—Looking to build on the runaway success of short message service (SMS), two more European mobile operators have joined in the rush to be among the first to launch multimedia messaging services (MMS). Vodafone Telecel in Portugal and Telecom Italia Mobile (TIM) have joined Westel in Hungary, Vodafone D2 in Germany, Oni in Portugal and Telenor in Norway in announcing their intentions to go live with MMS this year.
Vodafone Telecel, which admitted to investing 3 million euro (US$2.8 million) to launch MMS, confirmed it is looking to data services, including MMS, to generate around 20 percent of its profits within the next two to three years. To help meet this target, the company said it is willing to allow interconnection with other operators as soon as they launch MMS services.
TIM said its MMS would be free to users until 30 September, after which it would decide how much to charge for the service following analysis of how the service is being used (see related “Europe” news brief). In the first quarter of 2002, TIM recorded a 55-percent increase in SMS traffic with respect to last year.
