MMS Arrives For the iPhone — Will It Crash AT&T's Network? 153
itwbennett writes "AT&T has said it is already seeing 'record traffic during peak hours of the night' with just the users selected for testing, and so it is 'very nervous' about the spike in traffic that it expects will occur after it launched MMS service for iPhones on Friday. Of course, setting records for MMS traffic isn't that great a feat considering that 'the service in question has been out for years on other handsets and hasn't exactly taken the mobile world by storm. 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.' However, the carrier's fears in one respect may have been justified, says ABI analyst Dan Shey: 'Interoperability between carriers has always been an issue, and that's why MMS usage hasn't really taken off.'"
Sigh, AT&T... (Score:2, Insightful)
...when will they learn that by being d***-**s cheapskates trying to "earn" (save) a few pennies by not spending money on expanding the capacities of their network to allow more services, they will never reap the tremendous money involved in customers' spending in that area (or to put it differently: they won't have a chance to rape the customers with sky-high traffic fees per single MMS).
Just look at the operators in europe, and the money they are making by making sure their customers can actually send MMS' and use network access etc. Gee, who'd figure it'd pay off?! Not the dumb-greedy suits over at AT&T anyway, that's for sure. Sigh.
If it crashes AT&T's network... (Score:5, Insightful)
Just a thought (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:MMS is pretty pointless after all (Score:1, Insightful)
Don't use MMS (Score:4, Insightful)
MMS just helps cell/mobile telcos perpetuate the myth that they're now anything other than mere purveyors of wireless data connectivity. The iPhone has done so much to help break this pattern, it'd be a shame to go backwards.
arrives? (Score:5, Insightful)
MMS arrived for the iphone with the release of 3.0, which happened months ago, which means most of us have had MMS for months now. it's just you american peasants who are newly getting it. headline should read, AT&T finally allows MMS on american iphones
Re:MMS is pretty pointless after all (Score:1, Insightful)
MMS had a slow start, and by now just about all phones can send and receive email anyway.
I don't think even Steve Jobs could get people excited enough about MMS support to make a measurable blip in traffic at this point, but I may be overestimating the average iPhone user.
Let's see what happens to traffic when Google Wave goes live though. I predict a near perfect target audience match.
MMS? But surely no one wants that, you said? (Score:3, Insightful)
But how could it crash anything? - Surely, for years we've been told that the no one needs MMS anymore, certainly not Iphone users, and no one would possibly want to use it. So why is it news that it now has MMS - let alone the wild claim that it might crash a network?
Seriously, it's not news, unless you count taking so long to add the feature. We don't have news for any other phones adding features that have been around for years. The idea that MMS, which has been around for years, might suddenly result in a spike in usage in 2009, enough to cause a network to crash, is ludicrous - if Iphone users were so desperate for that feature, why did they buy an Iphone? (And remember that the Iphone is still a minority of all phones sold - yes, you can redefine the market to "smartphone" and say it's doing well there all you like, but the market here is that of all mobile phones which can send MMS, which is billions - so even if all Iphone users started using MMS, it wouldn't make any significant difference in the global usage.)
I thought this was news for new technology, not news for old technology... I bet in a few months time, we'll be hearing people say "Well it doesn't matter that other phones had MMS for years, people only started to use it with the Iphone" - despite the fact that, for years, all we heard was from those same Iphone fans "But why would I have the need for something outdated like MMS?" No, this is just another trumped up Slashvertisement for the Iphone, where a wild speculation is made as if Iphones were 90% of the market, and perpetuating the myth that no one uses anything until the Iphone does it.
Re:If it crashes AT&T's network... (Score:1, Insightful)
If they are nervous their networks have serious undercapacity. Around the globe in other countries NO operator has been nervous about running out of capacity, ever.