Cingular Announces Messaging Interoperability With Carriers
Fri Jul 08, 2005 12:30 pm
Cingular customers can exchange pictures and short video messages, including text and audio, with any Cingular, Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless, Leap Wireless and US Cellular customer, who has an MMS-enabled device, as well as any email address. With Intercarrier Multimedia Messaging Service, Cingular customers have access to the broadest wireless MMS community, representing 80 percent of wireless subscribers in the U.S.
Interoperability is great news for all wireless customers as well as the wireless industry as it dramatically expands the mobile universe of family and friends with whom wireless users can share photos and videos. In other words, the wireless world just got a lot easier to navigate. All that's needed is an MMS-capable phone and the desire to share.
"Making it possible for wireless users to share pictures and video messages with family and friends, regardless of carrier, is an important step in the widespread adoption of multimedia messaging," said Jim Ryan, vice president of Consumer Data Services, Cingular Wireless. "Cingular is excited to be delivering the full promise of wireless communication to our customers."
Capturing and sharing special or everyday moments is quick and easy with Multimedia Messaging. Using the multimedia messaging feature of their camera phones, Cingular customers can instantly share messages that include text, photos, animated graphics, voice messages, music and video clips.
Cingular (both Blue and Orange) have huge issues when it comes to multimedia messaging. Just try sending am MMS that includes a standard .3gp or .3p2 video file. Chances are it will never get though the Cingular gateway. I've been using phone from Verizon and Sprint to try to get a video onto a Cingular phone for weeks without success. You can't even send a video from a Cingular Blue to a Cingular Orange phone!
Also, any multi-slide MMS messages that you send to Cingular Orange Phones are sure to have at least one of their audio files removed in transit. Not to mention that fact that graphics will be shrunk to 1/4 their original hight and width when they end up on the Cingular Orange handset.
Why it this? Well to start with Cingular Orange MMS and Cingular Blue MMS processing is outsourced to two separate companies. A company called WiderThan handles the Cingular Orange MMS and another company called Infospace handles the Cingular Blue MMS. If you speak with any tech support people at Cingular you'll find that none of them even know what the real maximum message file size is. On both Orange and Blue sections of the Cingular site, it says that the maximum size is 300KB (which is in it self REALLY TINY, if you ask me). However, in troubleshooting this issue with Cingular Blue tech support for over 2 hours, we disconved that, in fact , to get a video MMS from one Blue handset to another Blue handset the total message size needs to be around 150KB.
When you try to send the same video MMS from a Blue handset to an Orange handset all you get is a message that says "One or more of the message componants have been deleted by MMS adaptation. Either the message was too large or the componants are unsuitable for your terminal." Note, both the Cingular handsets I'm using are running the same operating system, and are MMS capable, and are correctly configured.
This is a great example of a wireless carrier going out and making grand statements in the media without having anything at all to back it up, other than that they hired a third party to do the job for them, and then failed to manage them to esure they did the job right.
WL
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