After almost 20 years, the telecommunications company Vodafone wants to remove MMS from its offer. The reason for this is that the function is hardly used anymore. Here we have summarized the details.
Vodafone declares its “Multimedia Messaging Service” (MMS) to be discontinued. The former further development of the SMS will be discontinued on January 17, 2023, announced the telecommunications company in Düsseldorf. Deutsche Telekom had named December 31, 2022 as the date for the MMS shutdown a long time ago. A company spokesman said that the MMS dispatch might still be extended.
In April 2002 Vodafone started the MMS function. At that time, service was considered an innovation. Today, however, the head of technology at Vodafone Germany, Gerhard Mack, points out that cell phone pictures and videos have long been running safely and at high speed via popular messenger services. “MMS is out of date, its importance is low and the customer benefit is minimal.” That is why Vodafone and MMS went their separate ways from 2023. To a certain extent, the older sister of MMS, SMS (Short Message Service), remains available at Vodafone.
MMS has been out of fashion for a long time. Because it has several disadvantages: On the one hand, its size is limited to 300 kilobytes in Germany, which is very little – mobile phone photos usually require significantly more storage space, but can be compressed. Second disadvantage: Sending such a multimedia message costs extra – usually 39 cents are charged if the mobile phone user does not have a monthly free quota of MMS.
MMS shutdown at Vodafone: Technology is no longer up to date
Why you should send photos or short videos via MMS and not via messaging apps, where sending costs nothing and only uses a small snippet of the monthly data volume in mobile communications, should be sneaky to the vast majority of consumers. The Telekom spokesman states: “What was once innovative and ultra-modern is no longer up-to-date today.”
MMS was used the most almost a decade ago: In December 2012, around 13 million MMS were sent in the German Vodafone network. For comparison: In the same month there were 1.5 billion SMS – which makes it clear that MMS was ultimately never a mass phenomenon.
The demand has also been falling for a long time. If you compare December 2012 with December 2021, the number of MMS sent in the Vodafone network is only five percent from then. The Düsseldorf telecommunications company expects the number of MMS to decrease further in the next few months.
Shop recommendation for cell phones and smartphones
Offer from BestCheck.de | Prices include VAT plus shipping
Vodafone offers business customers “individual solutions”
After all, MMS still makes sense on company cell phones that are not allowed to have apps and are only intended for making calls. For business customers, “if necessary, individual solutions will be offered,” says Vodafone. The use of MMS is also understandable among older people: Many seniors only have a cell phone and no smartphone with an Internet function for apps.
With the third German mobile network operator, Telefónica with its brand O2, MMS also plays a minor role, but the plug is not pulled out yet. “We continue to offer the MMS service in our O2 network,” says a Telefónica spokesman. “There are currently no plans to discontinue the service.”
Only very few consumers are likely to see the foreseeable end of MMS at Vodafone and Telekom as a major loss. For mobile phones with the Android operating system, the RCS technology (“Rich Communication Services”) is a more modern alternative to SMS and MMS, which does not require an app and does not incur any extra costs. The equivalent of this at Apple is called iMessage.