Dear Editor,
It is with great interest that we read the article, “The MMS disconnect,” (RCR Wireless News, Aug. 13). Sybase 365 believes that the article has many inaccurate assumptions and misleading statements, and would like to clear the air about several points.
MMS interoperability in the United States is alive and well. Our customers, our partners, and our statistics all show a very strong surge of MMS interoperability traffic throughout operators in the U.S. In fact, as a primary U.S. interoperability hub, Sybase 365’s traffic has consistently grown extremely high month-over-month rates.
Additionally, several analyst firms specifically point to interoperability among major U.S. operators as the direct catalyst to the phenomenal growth of MMS. The U.S. is a world leader in MMS traffic; this kind of messaging growth and resilience does not happen without a successful SMS/ MMS ecosystem. Currently, almost 50 U.S. operators, including every tier 1 and tier 2 operator, partner with an MMS hub provider.
In the U.S., operators do not connect bi-laterally, as the article suggests; for almost all routes, they connect to an MMS hub provider, such as Sybase 365. Only a few select routes constitute direct connections between operators. Hub providers help alleviate any differences between the various makes of MMSCs at each operator’s premises.
Furthermore, hub providers provide enhanced capabilities, such as transcoding and media normalization, to ensure that images, audio, and videos are successfully rendered on the recipient handset. It is still up to the recipient operator to make sure the message is formatted correctly for the recipient’s handset. Hub providers make sure-with more than 99% certainty-that the message, once it gets to the recipient network, is capable of being handled.
In reviewing Sybase 365’s error rate, we find that 1% or less of the messages we receive are not delivered; the vast majority of those failures are because the originating subscriber mistyped the recipient phone number. On rare occasions, we find messages that fail due to invalid content or unsupported media.
The article suggests that a “customer might receive a text message with instructions on how to access the photo using a computer or a simple note saying ‘file error.'” This particular situation occurs only if the recipient of an MMS message does not have a handset that supports MMS. Currently, statistics show that more than half of U.S. handsets support MMS. Errors can occur whether or not the message was sent cross-operator, which has nothing to do with cross-operator MMS interoperability, as the article suggests.
Finally, the article attempts to make a correlation between person-to-person (P2P) MMS and application-to-person (A2P) MMS. P2P MMS requires interoperability among operators, while A2P MMS is achieved when content providers connect to an A2P MMS hub (such as Sybase 365)-or directly to the operator. A2P MMS traffic does not transcend multiple operators as the article suggests.
As previously stated, the article includes many inaccuracies and is not a reflection of the true state of MMS interoperability in the U.S. today.
Gregory Dunn, VP Americas
William Dudley, Senior Director, Messaging Products
Sybase 365
Editor’s Note: RCR Wireless News staff tested several MMS applications between various handsets. MMS messages sent from an AT&T Blackjack to several Verizon Wireless handsets did not go through, resulting in a “file error” message, nor did MMS messages sent from Verizon Wireless’ handsets to AT&T smartphones. Upon further research, we have been told smartphones must be specially programmed for interoperability in order for them to work.
