The nation’s wireless carriers have agreed to provide consumers with multimedia messaging service interoperability, a move that industry watcher say will give a much-needed boost to MMS use in the United States.
The Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association said the Inter-Carrier MMS Working Group Friday established a set of guidelines that will allow wireless carriers to phase in photo and video messaging services over time.
Currently, only customers of the same carrier network are capable of exchanging photo and video messaging. The new agreement will allow customers of different networks to swap multimedia images.
The MMS Industry Working Group began meeting in May with the objective of identifying a common feature set that could be supported by all participating carriers.
“I congratulate the members of the MMS Working Group on this landmark industry agreement,” said Steve Largent, CTIA president. “The wireless industry has proven today that it will set aside strong competitive differences in order to provide the customer with new and improved capabilities.”
Cingular Wireless said Tuesday it has selected Mobile 365, a mobile messaging service provider, for its inter-carrier MMS interoperability solution.
“Cingular has taken a bold step in redefining the global MMS market by using Mobile 365 as an intermediary for inter-carrier MMS delivery,” said Neville Street, president and chief executive officer of Mobile 365. “Just as our interoperability services helped ignite the SMS market in North America, we expect that this arrangement will be a landmark event for the emerging MMS market.”
Mobile 365 said it delivers more than 1 billion mobile messages each month and handles more than 80 percent of inter-carrier text messages in the United States between GSM, CDMA, and iDEN networks.
