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.
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