International MMS on Cell Phones

There are a lot of discussions going on in the blogosphere about how to get MMS on your cell phone when you travel internationally. Of course these days it is not uncommon for mobile phone providers to provide mms service locally or any area within the country. Some would charge a certain amount that is considered affordable but there are also those who charge a silly amount to their mobile phone users. However I don’t see this as something bizarre as I know that there is a cost involved in providing the service and the cost is significantly higher to provide mms service.

An MMS usually contains image(s) combined with a few lines of text. Some mms includes animation or video clips and as far as I am concerned, streaming the videos and animations to be readable on the other ends would means a challenge to the mobile phone service providers. They have to make sure that those MMSes sent by their users to be properly went through and later to be properly accessible by the recipients. During earlier days of MMS trend, it is hard to send MMS via mobile phones and furthermore receiving them would lead to disasters LOL.

What is MMS by the way? MMS is a telecommunications standard for sending messages that include multimedia objects such as images, audio, video, and rich text. MMS is actually a second generation of SMS and to send or receive MMS, you should first have a WAP enabled mobile phone. A standard mobile phone which is limited to make or receive calls as well as sending and receiving text messages or SMS cannot be used for this special purpose. There are a lot of processes involved in ensuring the multimedia contents to be properly sent or received, such as encoding process, conversion process, and extracting process. I rather not go into details into how the mobile phone service providers make it possible but as far as I am concerned, there are a lot of complicated processes involved.

Now that you know that the MMS service is costing a lot of money, you might already understand why sending MMS internationally is another different story. In other words, the mobile phone service providers would have to expand their facilities even more and at the same time they have to make friends with other international mobile phone providers. The cost would go much higher and if the users are not that fancied about sending mss, and then the company couldn’t make money. In order to encourage the mobile phone users to send out MMS, they have to reduce the charges first for promotional purposes but that would mean they have to bear the losses first.

If there are a lot of requests or feedbacks from the mobile phone users to be able to send and receive MMS internationally, then the company should do something about it to fulfill the needs. International MMS would cost a lot more and to be able to receive the MMS, maybe the company has to charge the recipient as well. This is the case in the United States currently where the recipients are charged to receive SMS (let alone MMS) while this scenario is impossible in some Asian countries and also in the UK.

What are the reasons behind all these? Well, to completely understand the whole situation, you must first understand the culture of each country. In the US, the citizens are well exposed to the technology. Since the introduction of Windows operating system by Microsoft, the people are more concerned about having a nice and modern personal computer. The demand was for PCs and laptops and therefore the manufacturers and service providers were racing with each other to provide better products.

On the other hand, people in Asian countries and other international countries see a lot more technology advancement in mobile phones and communication fields. They see new brand mobile phones in the market every day and eventually the market becomes bigger and bigger. People there are more concerned about having a stylish and modern mobile phone than a computer at home. From only able to send simple text messages or SMS, the people demanded to have mobile phones that could send out pictures and images as well video clips. So the mobile phone service providers supply the MMS service.

What I am trying to say is the demands are different between these two big continents. The US people such as in California demand for computers that are multitasking while the people in Asia countries demand for mobile phones that are multitasking. Californians are more concerned about what their computers can do while a Singaporean might be more concerned about what his mobile phone can do. One community is concerned about having a super PC in every home while another community is concerned about having a mobile phone that can be used to send out SMS and MMS internationally.

To connect the dots, some entrepreneurs have managed to grab the opportunity by setting up services that claim to be able to provide MMS services so that you can send out MMS to international countries and vice versa. If you are in the country such as in Los Angeles, you can send out MMS to other international countries such as India or China. If you are in those international countries, you can also receive MMS sent out from Los Angeles. Since the provider only supports international MMS, the cost has been reduced since the company only specialized in that particular area.

These operators are the middlemen. They are the ones dealing with the home country mobile phone service providers and propose a phone plan that are affordable and agreed by both sides. They are responsible to make sure that any MMS sent or received between international countries are processed efficiently to avoid dissatisfaction amongst cell phone users.

What you need to do once you have subscribed to any of these services is you just have to configure your cell phone to be able to send and receive MMS internationally. Setting the cell phone to be able to receive international MMS is simple and you just have to follow the manual or the instructions provided by the MMS providers.

However, from what I see and from what I understand, the technology is continuously advancing at a rapid pace and therefore there are a lot of possibilities that could happen. If these days it is hard to find an affordable international MMS service, there might be chances in the future where the mobile phone service providers can provide free SMS and extremely low cost for sending out MMS. I believe that the improvements are there but they would be achieved gradually at a steady pace.

As for now, we don’t have many choices and therefore we should find alternative ways to communicate with each other in style. Instead of sending out MMS internationally and pay some money, we can always revert to sending out emails since we can attach images and pictures into the email. Instead of sending the videos, we can upload them onto any free video streaming sites such as Youtube and we can then send out the links to our friends.