Archive for October 9th, 2009

iPhone MMS – What is the Big Deal?

Published by Babar Bhatti on October 9, 2009 under Gadgets, Media, Mobile Applications, Mobile Phones, SMS, Smart Phones, iPhone

One of the early complaints about iPhone have been the missing multimedia messaging (MMS) feature. It took about 2 years to roll MMS out and one of the reason is said that AT&T was not ready to support that level of network traffic. Apple had to provide the software to support MMS as well. Well, now that MMS has been officially released worldwide, what does it tell the usage of MMS and the traffic tell us?

One of the interesting thing is that MMS as a general feature has been slow to take off. We discussed it here. Now that iPhone has support for MMS, there is additional info about the reasons and the problems associated with MMS. Cost and interoperability are two major factors. With AT&T, the price for messaging is included in the SMS messaging plans so its not a big deal. Interoperability and reliability of sending/receiving messages remains a concern.

Personally, I have been facing issues with sending messages on AT&T network after the MMS roll out. Even plain SMS messages have been failing and that almost never happened before. Here’s a quote from Computer World.

In 2008, MMS made up just 2.5 percent of all messages sent from phones worldwide, meaning about 97.5 percent were SMS text messages, according to ABI Research. ABI expects the MMS share to grow to just 4.5 percent by 2014.

Given the amount of data that iPhone fans are already using on AT&T’s network for Web browsing, video, e-mail and social networking, it would take quite a popularity breakthrough for MMS to drag down the infrastructure through sheer traffic, analysts said. However, the carrier’s fears in one respect may have been justified, said ABI analyst Dan Shey.

Several factors have dampened the popularity of MMS, according to analysts and industry observers. A big one is that the messages still don’t always get through.

Related articles of interest:

Well, among all the recent upgrade to iPhone software, my favorite remains cut and paste its nice to get multi media messaging – let’s see when it actually works!

TelecomPk.Net Partners With ‘Are You Online’ – A Zumbeel Event

Published by Arsalan Mir on October 9, 2009 under Emerging Markets Telecom, Telecommunications, events

Zumbeel- a telecom career etool, have been doing Live Forums (ZLF) from around a year to engage professionals in presentations and discussions sessions on the latest in wireless technologies, its prospects, career hurdles and opportunities and the progress of the industry.

This time around they are coming with a forum on a larger scale bringing together telecom and internet professionals in ‘Are You Online’.

6829_155174056466_603606466_3215970_2741492_n
Field of telecommunications and internet together have contributed a great deal to Pakistan’s economy, its image and has called for great investments that led to a new era of progress. Lot more needs to be done and this event will act as learning ground for top cream of Pakistan to learn what and how technologies have done to change the lives of normal people. And how they can use these technologies to enrich their career lives?

The event is scheduled on October 17, 2009 at Avari Towers, Karachi. To know more about free registrations, agenda and speakers profile visit the event website here.

‘Are You Online’ is exclusively sponsored by Telenor Persona Weblounge. Along with TelecomPk.Net event partners include Dawn, FM107, Teletimes, Personality Quotient and  Hire Labs.