It is finally going to be possible to transfer MMS messages between U.S. carriers.
Yes, X.400 is finally here.
X.400, I should note, was an interoperability system for moving messages betwen X.25 networks, and for billing the costs through the carriers. It took years to negotiate, it was difficult to implement, and it was made obsolete by the Internet's basic agreement to move the bits first and settle later.
Today's mobile or cellular operators (take your pick on the name) are much like the old X.25 operators, such as GEIS and CompuServe. The networks they operate are walled gardens, very proprietary, so it takes both technology and diplomacy to get stuff over the walls.
This is not cool, once customers start taking pictures with their camera phones and (under operator urging) want to share them.
Why do operators want to replicate the failed past? Because they think they can prevent the creation of a real Internet in the mobile world, and continue to charge per-bit.
Thus, while you will be able to move pictures off your mobile phone, it's going to cost you. This fact should keep stand-alone digital cameras viable for years, even if camera phones become equally feature-laden.
The news here is that Mobile 365 has signed agreements for transferring photos and other big files between the two major U.S. carriers, Cingular and Verizon.
Mobile 365 offers what it calls an operator charging gateway, which means it can handle the billing on data transfers between networks.
The result is called MMS interoperability, but it comes at a price set by operators.
Camera phone users can expect some nasty surprises in their mobile bills over the next few months, because if there is consumer training on this I'm sure it will involve only the technology, not the cost.
Still, for anyone involved in content, or moving content, over mobile networks, this is a red letter day.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for over 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the "Interactive Age Daily" for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age, and dozens of other publications over the years.
1. Jesse Kopelman on March 25, 2005 04:35 PM writes...
While charging by the bit is certainly still a factor in the walled garden approach, don't forget about the our network vs. their network idea. By and large network coverage is very similar between carriers, especially Verizon and Cingular. Since you can't compete on where the customers phone is going to work, and you don't want to compete on price, you have to compete on what the customer can do with his phone. When everyone keeps their customers inside a walled garden, the advantage goes to the company with the most customers. It also incents customers to try and get their friends/family to use that same carrier. This is a model used sucessfully for a while by AOL. Eventually, however, the internet community became far more compelling than anything AOL could offer and a big factor for this was broadband. I think this is one of the reasons mobile carriers have been tentative in their broadband rollouts. To a degree, they realize that when broadband is commonplace on the mobile device, having a walled garden becomes a sucker bet.
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