OSLO, Norway-An agreement among Sweden’s operators to allow customers to send multimedia messaging services (MMS) between competing networks has failed to encompass all the country’s operators, as giant TeliaSonera has yet to get on board.
With MMS widely tipped by both studies and pundits to be the next killer service that captures the interest of the youth and short message service (SMS) users, thereby powering the eventual success of third-generation (3G) networks, cooperation among operators is vital to maximizing traffic.
But while Vodafone and Tele2/Comviq proudly announced their users could start sending MMS messages to each other, Telia, which has about half of Sweden’s mobile-phone users, isn’t ready.
Although the three operators announced last week that an MMS cooperation was imminent, and TeliaSonera’s information chief Ola Kallemur told Swedish news agency TT that an agreement was “absolutely vital,” the current tune is rather different.
“Telia appears to have neither the technology nor the organization ready. For the moment, we don’t in fact even know who we should speak with at Telia to arrange an agreement,” said Karl-Johan Nybell, Tele2 product manager, to newspaper Svenska Dagbladet.
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