Something old, something new

At its heart, MMS is really a marriage of the new with some old and trusted technologies. There’s a bit of the new, the WAP and GPRS protocols that allow modern mobiles to communicate through the Internet. And there is a good old-fashioned e-mail, with the MIME encoding that has allowed us to send attach data files to e-mail for years.

File attachments have gotten a bad rap in recent years, since they’ve become the medium for virus transmission. But their legit use remains unparalleled. Modern business communications would probably be crippled without e-mail attachments. We use these to send word processed reports, spreadsheets, presentations, photos, and other data to colleagues and clients – whether these are down the hall or on another continent.

It’s not really known to the general public, but MMS isn’t just a phone-to-phone communications medium. You can address an MMS message to an e-mail address. And if there are photos attached to the MMS, they arrive at their destination as an old fashioned e-mail with file attachments.

That’s one clue to the subversive nature of MMS. It costs much more money to send a 160-character SMS message to your girlfriend in London (averaging P10.00), but if you send a photo of yourself from the same mobile to her office e-mail address, it will only cost you P5.00 – or half of the cost of a text message. As I write this, Sun Cellular, the newest operator in town, is even offering MMS at a promotional rate of P2.00 per message.

On the newer smart phones, you’re not even limited to sending digital photos or audio clips in an MMS. You can attach any digital file. If you can manage to get the file into your phone—perhaps sent over from your laptop or PDA through an infrared or Bluetooth connection—you can send office documents as well. Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Adobe PDF, ZIP files, the whole digital smorgasbord. All these can be attached to an MMS message and sent to another phone, or e-mailed to a computer.

Going back to our previous example, why stop at a mere 160 characters of sweet nothings to your paramour (or business associate, for that matter), when you can attach a 10-page Word document detailing your thoughts in the most minute detail?

The files sent can be quite large as well. When MMS was first announced by the local telcos, they pegged the limit at about 30kb of data per message. The advent of camera phones with video clips has upped the ante. In a bid for this market, telcos allowed the video clips to be sent via MMS as well, increasing the limit to over 100kb.

The actual cut-off can be quite large. The upper limit is not generally known. Some tests have shown that file attachments over 200kb have been successfully sent through local MMS operators.