The Wall Street Journal on Friday published an article about the effect of wireless local number portability on camera phone users. In essence, if you're used to sending photos directly from your camera phone to other people's handsets using the same cellular network as yours, forget about doing that if you switch to another network.
The WSJ notes that interoperability for sending photos from handsets to other networks probably won't be available until the middle of next year and possibly not until 2005. Jeffrey Nelson, the public relations spokesperson for Verizon Wireless, says the cellular operator wants handset-to-handset interoperability and is "hopeful" that at least a few operators will offer photo interoperability by the middle of next year.
Jeffrey says when U.S. operators began offering SMS interoperability, Verizon's SMS traffic tripled overnight -- without Verizon doing anything to promote it.
Camera phone interoperability
The same thing will happen, I'm convinced, when camera phone photos can be sent to all U.S. operators, handset-to-handset. Indeed, as Jeffrey notes in the article, many cellular subscribers didn't even know they couldn't send an SMS to another carrier's handset.
By the way, if you like statistics, the WSJ uses figures from the Zelos Group saying phones with built in cameras will represent four percent of U.S. handsets in use by the end of the year and almost 25 percent, 45 million, by 2006.
Sprint PCS, according to the article, says its subscribers sent 23 million picture messages from their phones in the third quarter of this year, more than double the 10 million sent in the previous quarter.
More difficult than the ads promote
The WSJ says because of the lack of interoperability, sending photos is often much more difficult than advertisements and commercials portray. "'Because of the difficulties, most photos taken now by camera phones are instead sent to an e-mail address, where they can be opened as attachments,' said Seamus McAteer, senior wireless analyst with Zelos Group. (You won't see that in the TV ads.)
"'The convenience of being able to go through your telephone address book, hit a name, and be able to send directly to their handset has a definite sort of viral appeal,' he said. But 'if you try that on [cellphone] networks today, it's pretty damn difficult to establish.'"
It's true that interoperability will generate dramatically more traffic for picture messaging, but at least you are able to send photos to e-mail addresses -- from the handset to an e-mail address and vice versa.
For more on WLNP
If you'd like to learn more about WLNP, I posted a dozen tips and recommendations on my Reiter's Wireless Data Web Log as well as including tips from Business 2.0 writer and Weblogger, Om Malik.
a while ago i wrote http://www.burningdoor.com/steve/archives/000052.html here on the details operators will face when trying to implement intercarrier MMS. it's a lot more complicated than intercarrier SMS because of a magnitude of differences in handset capabilities, but also because much of the MMS software written in the past didn't have WNP in mind - so there's a whole wave of infrastructure upgrades and standardization that will have to happen before we'll see interoperability across all operators.
this will be especially complicated for operators like verizon that don't implement true OMA MMS.
Posted by: Steve Olechowski | Monday, November 24, 2003 at 10:55 AM