LightSurf advances MMS with interoperability and new Mexican operator

LightSurf Technologies, the company behind the picture mail and video mail services of Sprint and Bell Mobility, this week announced the successful intercarrier interoperability of those services and added Grupo Iusacell S.A. de C.V. to its stable of operator customers.

Iusacell is the first operator to publicly announce its adoption of LightSurf’s outsourced multimedia messaging service center (MMSC) offering. The Mexican operator also will use LightSurf’s PictureMail platform. Both products are built on the LightSurf 5 Open Standards MMS Platform.

LightSurf’s outsourced MMSC will allow Iusacell to deploy MMS and PictureMail service on its CDMA network to legacy handsets, MMS handsets or e-mail.

"The outsourced solution drives time-to-market and flexibility and is the key driver for our business," said Robin Nijor, vice president of marketing and sales at LightSurf. "We are now on a path to deploy four to five more outsourced MMSC services this year."

LightSurf hopes to have approximately 10 operators launched by the end of the year for a combination of its outsourced MMSC and its PictureMail service.

"The outsourced service bureau model is something the market has a great need for in terms of rapid deployment and the difficulty and heavy lifting for an MMSC deployment," Nijor said.

The new deployments will be with both CDMA and GSM operators. LightSurf also will announce the delivery of interoperability services in the next few months for operators using both technologies. LightSurf will provide that interoperability using industry standards such as OMA, 3GPP and 3GPP2.

Interoperability, like it was for short message service, is one of the roadblocks to more widespread adoption of MMS services. LightSurf, Sprint and Bell Mobility of Canada announced this week they have solved that issue for camera phone users across their networks (to see Wireless Review’s February issue for a profile on LightSurf click here ).

Customers of both operators now can share pictures directly between phones or other devices and destinations. LightSurf handles the picture message delivery, reporting and charge reconciliation, message optimization and digital rights management that enables the operators to exchange and store messages.

LightSurf’s goal is to provide such interoperability between any carrier using any technology or MMS platform.

"There is no other approach to take because you have to support all networks and all devices. And wireless operators aren’t going to go for anything that is not open and industry standard," Nijor said.