Dec 13, 2004 12:00 PM,

Getting the message out and about

By Jason Ankeny

How's this for irony: Even as carriers continue to stress the mobility and independence their wireless technologies afford users, the photos and video clips you can shoot anytime and anywhere are still subject to house arrest. Without inter-carrier operability mechanisms in place, multimedia messaging services, or MMS, remain confined solely to each subscriber's network. Sure, you can snap a picture of your friends with your next-generation handset, but unless they're billed by the same carrier, you can't send that photo to their phones.

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That's all about to change. In late October, in conjunction with its annual Wireless IT & Entertainment event, the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association announced an agreement among U.S. wireless carriers to implement MMS interoperability across their respective networks. According to the CTIA, the necessary interoperability guidelines and agreements are in place, and carriers are now implementing solutions against that framework, with interconnections scheduled for completion industrywide by the first quarter of 2005.

If history is a barometer, interoperability should prove the spark that lights the fuse under widespread MMS adoption and use simply by demolishing the barriers that separate subscribers from sharing content across rival networks.

“We've been working on driving MMS interoperability for quite some time — we've seen that's where the real take-up happens,” said Sony Ericsson's Geoff Hollingworth, who oversees the company's Mobility World applications development forum. “After all, I should be able to send you a photograph without knowing what carrier you're on.”

Short messaging service (SMS) interoperability, first announced by the CTIA in mid-2002, was the catalyst that vaulted text messaging from novelty status to everyday usage. Consider data released earlier this year by messaging solutions provider Mobile 365 (formerly InphoMatch), which administrates about 80% of inter-carrier SMS messaging in the U.S. The company delivered nearly 2 billion SMS messages in the first quarter of 2004, up from 650 million messages in the first quarter of 2003. Mobile 365 also posted a record SMS delivery increase for the first quarter of 2004, up 36.51% from the final quarter of 2003.

“The traffic growth as a result of SMS interoperability has been significant,” said Mark Desaultels, vice president of wireless Internet development for CTIA. “There was never any mystery in our member companies about the effects of SMS interoperability, and certainly the numbers bear that out.”

Given the number of camera-enabled handsets in the market (about 96% of handsets sold in the U.S. are now data-capable), the time for MMS interoperability also seems right.

“From an operator perspective, until there is significant handset penetration, it's probably not worth going into the interop world,” said Derek Tam, Mobile 365 chief technology officer. “If you launch it and there aren't enough handsets, you will negatively impact MMS service. But we now firmly believe there is significant penetration.”

In fact, although CTIA did not officially announce MMS interoperability until late October, the wheels have actually been in motion for some time — and are continuing to accelerate.

“These guidelines are only the beginning of what the marketplace will come to expect [from interoperability] and what the carriers and their partners will be expecting to be able to provide,” Desaultels said. “But this gives us a starting place to address the market that has developed.”

The first CTIA-sponsored inter-carrier MMS roundtable took place in Washington on May 11. According to Desaultels, within CTIA there exists a group called the Wireless Internet Caucus, which comprises not only traditional wireless companies, such as carriers, infrastructure developers and handset manufacturers but also a number of large IT and Internet firms, including Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo, Intel, Sun Microsystems and Cisco Systems. This caucus is helmed by a working leadership council that, in 2002, formulated the guidelines and timetable for SMS inter-carrier interoperability and a year later established the framework for common text messaging short-codes.

“The leadership group determined that its next near-term interoperability mission would be multimedia messages, and it would commit to interoperability by the end of the year,” Desaultels said. “Packet size, file format support and other specifications were developed subsequent to that May meeting and agreed to in October.”

The most recent version of the interoperability guidelines, dated Oct. 4, states that each participating carrier will handle inbound MMS traffic according to its respective network capabilities and feature sets. Operators will support, at minimum, about a dozen media formats, including MIDI, JPEG and H.263 video, and the format support list will be updated on an as-needed basis, with carriers continuing to meet in order to make sure it remains up-to-date.

The guidelines also address interconnection solutions, focusing on two primary interface approaches. One establishes a connection and feature set between carriers' multimedia message service centers (MMSC) and an inter-carrier vendor (ICV) operating as a message transfer gateway. The other establishes a connection and feature set between two ICVs, although if ICVs already share a common interface, this issue becomes moot.

Few observers expect operators to connect directly, an approach that has historically proved problematic in European markets where interoperability has already launched.

“Intermediaries bring a number of values to the table,” said Mobile 365's Tam, whose company announced in late October a deal to provide MMS interoperability services for Cingular Wireless. “First, we have the connectivity piece — an operator only has to connect to one place to facilitate interoperability. The next level of benefit is that we can shield operators from competitive advantage issues. If a carrier is bringing out a new handset, they only have to let us know, whereas if they were to interop directly with another carrier, they're going to have to inform one another well in advance.”

The CTIA document goes on to stipulate that the terminating carrier is responsible for transcoding the message for transmission across various network platforms, either in its MMSC or through a third-party ICV. Although the minimum and maximum message sizes vary according to the type of media format, the guidelines suggest that images do not exceed 500 kb/s, with a 100 kb/s cut-off recommended for audio and video. As for revenue, the group agreed to a “bill and keep” approach for billing and settlement.

The guidelines also contain an outline for mitigating spam that leads off by limiting inter-carrier messaging to “MMS messages sent from a mobile phone number to a mobile number across wireless carrier networks only.” Each participating carrier is responsible only for messages that originate from a mobile number, but messages originating from Internet portals may be classified as “mobile-originated” if a carrier opts to allow legacy customers (ones whose phones can send and receive text messages but not multimedia messages) to reply to MMS via the Web.

Because messages from any other wireless or fixed source — among them third-party applications providers connected to a carrier's MMSC, as well as e-mail and Web-based messaging interfaces — do not fall within the current scope of the guidelines, they are not permitted, although carriers are currently investigating alternative business models. Participating carriers must also agree to support digital rights management (DRM), with the originating carrier culpable for maintaining the integrity of the content.

“The scope is fairly simple right now,” Desaultels said. “There is a slew of issues that have to be addressed, including more support for DRM, additional issues on spam and viruses and direct connections between carriers themselves. These are the kinds of capabilities that will lead to even more rich media being exchanged.”

No one is quite sure just what the impact of MMS interoperability will be, but expectations are high.

“Nine months from now, you're going to get the kind of growth that we've seen in the SMS world, where at least 50% of messages go out-of-network,” Tam said.

If his projections are correct, that would mean a huge boost for all links in the MMS value chain.

“Historically, when we look at technology evolution, things that have been adopted drive huge revenue for operators,” said Scott Silk, CEO of mobile applications developer Action Engine. “Not to mention that there are a lot of aggregators out there that are going to be needed for things like MMS and interoperability.”

But expect baby steps, at least at first. While video and audio content certainly represent a critical component of carriers' and content aggregators' long-term plans for MMS, for now, interoperability is mostly focused on the still photos that, for most users, represent the crux of the MMS experience at this point in time.

“Clearly, camera phones have struck a chord with wireless consumers, but the fact of the matter is that most pictures taken with camera phones today don't leave the phones,” Desaultels said. “There is a pent-up opportunity for carriers to increase the mobile message use made of those photos. But exactly what the consumer-to-consumer or peer-to-peer demand or use will be is one of those unknowns.”

And to Desaultels, interoperability represents only the beginning of MMS, not its culmination.

“This is a managed approach to opening the floodgates,” he said. “There is an unending list of potential applications, particularly applications that will be offered by third-party content developers and aggregators that are not yet able to offer them because they don't fit into this mobile-to-mobile model. When those kinds of applications are enabled, we'll really see what mobile multimedia is all about.”