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Multimedia Messaging Struggles in Europe
Telecom Operators Hope That the New Service Will Gain Momentum
By DAVID PRINGLE
HANNOVER, Germany - On his birthday last August, Andrew Finkelstein's
wife bought him camera attachment for his new color-screen mobile phone.
At first, the 34-year-old financial trader in the City of London had
some fun sending friends pictures via e-mail, but he hasn't used camera for
the past few months. "It's like toy, then you move on to new toys", he
says. "There are zero practical applications."
That isn't what mobile-phone operators in Europe and The U.S. want to
hear.
The operators are engaged in a big push to persuade their customers to
use their phones to send each other pictures and audio messages. Multimedia
messaging, or MMS, as these services are known, is widely regarded as
operator's best hope of developing a major new source of revenue to add to
voice calls and text messages. But almost a year after MMS was fist
launched in Europe, the service is still struggling to gain momentum.
In the U.S. operators are just beginning to offer MMS.
T-Mobile, a unit of Deutsche Telekom AG and an MMS pioneer, said last
week that it sold 500.000 MMS handsets in Europe and the U.S. by end of
January, and during January 500.000 picture messages were sent by its
customers. That suggests people with MMS phones are sending on average just
one or two pictures a months. However, a T-Mobile spokeswoman
says the number of MMS messages sent on its networks doubled from November
to December and the company is confident usage will continue to grow. But
some analysts now believe it could be as late as 2007 before the service
becomes a mass-market phenomena. One stumbling block is that operators have
been slow to set up agreements with other operators that allow messages to
be sent from one network to another.
More important, MMS handsets and services appear to be priced too high
for a key group of users-teenagers, who are typically avid users of text
messaging.
T-Mobile's MMS charges vary by country, but in the U.K., customers have
to pay 35 pence (51 European cents) to send a picture message or they can
buy bundles up front, such as 10messages for |