One of the principles we’re promoting over at the Telco 2.0 blog is that you need to optimise your existing business as well as make changes to move forward. Those optimisations are what gives you the slack to fund the change without your shareholders suffering cardiac arrest at seeing your future plans. We give some examples down at the bottom of this post on improving voice and messaging revenues.
I came across another couple of examples this week. The wife and kids are abroad, and only accessible via mobile phone as they’re staying in the summer house. So as I was crossing Hungerford bridge in central London I thought I’d take a self portrait with London’s sights in the background and send my best wishes. This was to be my first ever MMS message. (Obviously, it’s a really compelling service… not.)
Drat and buggerations. My new phone isn’t set up for MMS. There’s no auto-discovery via DHCP for the settings, no universal standard that the default MMS gateway is configured in DNS to be called “MMS”. So I’m stuck.
It should be a shame and embarassment to the industry that people face this situation, particularly given the trend towards buying unlocked handsets that aren’t factory-configured for your network. How bad it is really? Well, if I have one attempt at sending an MMS, and it fails, the real revenue loss is the 50 more I didn’t send before I get my next handset, plus the, um, couple of thousand other people I also denigrate MMS to and don’t bother even trying.
But it gets worse. Now I’m home and have uploaded the picture to my PC, I still can’t send it! They’ve not done any deals with Skype et al to revenue share MMS money and make it worth their while to integrate and promote this capability. So I’m sending SMS messages at 4p a pop via Skype, but the revenue opportunity was far greater. Their loss. Mine too.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 02:20 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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I never understood why an email to MMS gateway wasn't an easy thing to produce. It seemed to me they were so similar (effectively MIME-based) that it would not be rocket science. I never did find the time (or the person with sufficient knowledge) to determine why it was so hard!?
Perhaps it would have broken a few business models (that are now broken anyway)?
Martin,
A quick Google search would have come to your resue:
http://vehera.symbiandevelopersjournal.com/mms_settings_for_vodafone_uk_orange_tmobile_bt_mobile_virgin.htm
To me your example is akin to buying a broadband router and expecting the settings for every provider in the world to be pre-configured - they aren't.
Do you have any statistical evidence that there is a increased trend towards sim-free handsets?
If you look at CPW (the largest EuroRetailer) results they sold 516k sim-free handset y/e 2006 vs 512k handsets y/e 2005. Hardly a significant increase especially when both pre-pay (4,252 vs 3,272) and postpay (3,423 vs 2,816) increased significantly.
If you have purchased it off ebay - it could be second hand or it could be "grey" market - neither of which would come pre-configured. I don't expect any operator or manufacturer would also encourage these to be pre-configured.
Personally, last week I got a free handset from upgrading my contract and sent a MMS to my Mum the same day - no configuration, no problem. It worked out of the box.
You just have to love "barriers to entry" when everyone is calling you a "dumb pipe"
Keep Smiling,
Keith
The phone was direct from Nokia.
CPW have more incentive to push SIM-enabled handsets as there's more commission, particularly for carriers where they do more of the billing and support. eBay and independent retailers are where the SIM-free handsets come from (plus Expansys at the high end).
Discovery of the MMS, WAP, GPRS, Internet, whatever gateways should have been sorted years ago. It hasn't. People swap SIMs, handsets, and clearly buy tons of unlocked handsets or get a dodgy guy to unlock it for them. I wonder what proportion of handsets are actually correctly configured with the right gateways? I suspect we're talking a non-trivial revenue loss.
Posted by: at July 3, 2006 02:52 PMMMS sucks sorry! ShoZu (as I am sure you already know) is the best way to get photos on the internet from your phone iff you have: 1. unlimited data plan (or lots of money) 2. a handset that is supported by ShoZu which I think your Nokia phone is!
Posted by: at July 26, 2006 06:44 AM