Vodafone will discontinue the multimedia messaging service, known as MMS, on January 17, 2023, as only a fraction of the MMS sent at weddings is already on the provider’s network. Services like WhatsApp, Signal and iMessage have been around for a long time. However, the old SMS remains active.
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MMS is a further development of SMS (Short Message Service) and the later EMS (Advanced Messaging Service) and comes from times before the data services commonly used today. With EMS, messages and short pictures longer than 160 characters could be sent as emoticons, but it was MMS that made it possible to send pictures, short videos and documents over the early multimedia telephone. The specification does not provide a size limit, but practically all German network operators limit MMS to 300 KB, leading to forced transcoding on the device and poor quality for images and videos.
Business customer with option to continue
On the other hand, nowadays, several gigabytes can easily be transmitted via smartphone to all regions of the world in one session, so that MMS hardly plays a role in the network. Hence, Vodafone’s service will be completely discontinued on January 17, 2023. Only business customers can negotiate individual terms.
Always in the shadow of SMS
MMS in Vodafone reached its peak in December 2012, when 13 million MMS were sent within a month. For comparison: 1.5 billion text messages were sent in the same month. December has always been the busiest month for MMS in all these years, explains Vodafone today. But currently the company counts only 5 percent of the former traffic and thus 650,000 MMS per month. Vodafone believes that the number of MMS it sends monthly will continue to decline, so that when the system is shut down, there is hardly any need for about a year.
SMS is easy
On the other hand, it looks completely different with SMS, which Vodafone will continue to follow. ,The SMS service works independently of the MMS service and will be able to rest and celebrate its 30th anniversary in December 2022“Vodafone explains, which means anything but an early end. Vodafone recently auctioned the first SMS sent since 1992 in the form of non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
Computerbase received information about this article from Vodafone under NDA. The only requirement was the earliest possible publication time.
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