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Swisscom to discontinue MMS service
- can16358p 5y agoWas there any country that MMS ever took off and was actually used in practice, beyond proof of concept?
- tssva 5y agoThe US where it is currently still widely used.
- daneel_w 5y agoIt saw pretty common usage in Sweden, and I'm convinced we weren't alone. The advent of iMessage, smartphones and mobile data traffic changed a lot.
- tasha0663 5y agoI have 21 unread messages for today in the "Family Text" which is a sprawling MMS conversation with relatives where not everyone gets the image others are talking about, and the messages don't always arrive in sequence if at all. We should really be doing this another way, so yes, please kill MMS.
- mastercheif 5y agoMMS was popular enough in the US that when Apple added MMS support in iPhoneOS 3.0, at&t delayed supporting it for iPhone users based on fears that it would bog down their cellular data infrastructure.
- vel0city 5y agoI'm in the US. I started using MMS quite a bit in 2003, about the time I got my first 3G phone. It was quite handy for sending photos with family, and I had several friends who also could receive MMS without issue. At the time the carriers in the area counted MMS messages the same as SMS messages, so if you had a texting plan you usually could also use MMS at no extra cost. Thus it was easy to share photos from our early camera phones with each other, before Facebook or Whatsapp even existed. And then when Facebook did exist but before using a Facebook app was a thing you could upload photos to things like Facebook through MMS gateways as well. Most of the original photos I uploaded to Facebook were things uploaded from a camera phone through MMS messages as it was quite easy to do. I used to use the MMS email gateway a decent bit as well. It made it really easy to get notifications for things before I got a Symbian phone with IMAP on it and could just use my regular email on the go. I still get some notifications through the MMS gateway from some services. I still use MMS a decent bit. Its still the least common denominator between everyone I know for group messaging, and for the most part is a somewhat seamless experience between Android phones, iPhones, and non-smartphones. I do tend to do most of my messaging through an app, but probably 10% of my messages still go through SMS/MMS these days for those people who I don't have an overlapping app with, usually because they only use iMessage or they don't have a smartphone.
- kasper_kerem 5y agowhat about USSD and WAP? - sorry, had to ask :D
- denysvitali 5y agoThis would be interesting for the blue / green bubble debate. When you send an emoji, you send an MMS...
- markus92 5y agoIs that a thing in Swiss? Thought it was all Whatsapp/Telegram there.
- marcus_cemes 5y agoI just learnt of the blue/green debate recently from a MKBHD video. WhatsApp is suprisingly prevalient here.
- endofreach 5y agoWhy do you send a MMS when sending an emoji? That doesn‘t make sense to me…
- brirec 5y agoTo my knowledge you don’t. But SMS messages natively only use 7-bit ASCII. Sending emojis requires both carrier and device/OS support, because it’s impossible to represent an emoji using pure 7-bit ASCII. As an aside, Unicode SMS messages fit far fewer characters per message (around 70 as opposed to 160), so most mobile devices still default to 7-bit ASCII unless the message can’t be represented as such.
- prmoustache 5y agoAnytime you send something in utf-8 you send an mms if my memory is correct. SMS only works with ASCII and thus english language.
- dotancohen 5y agoI'm pretty sure that I was sending Hebrew SMS messages before I had an MMS-capable device or service. Circa 2001 or so.
- nottorp 5y agoDoes anyone in the whole world use that? I didn't use it before internet connected smartphones because the images were crap. Now there's really no point in it.
- disiplus 5y agoi used it to send images when the other person did not have whatsapp.
- robin_reala 5y agoI use it to send photos to Android-using friends and family, mostly because it means I can stay in a single messaging app (iMessage). MMS is unlimited on my plan.
- boudin 5y agoIt's quite used in France. Technically speaking it has no replacement, it's the only system that works natively with any phone, doesn't require you to install a dedicated app, create an account on a third party and do not push all those constraints on the people you're sending messages to.
- tpush 5y agoPresumably every time an iOS user in America sends a picture or video to an Android person. So, quite a lot I'd wager.
- andybak 5y agoI use it for all the people I know where we don't share a common proprietary messanging app. I have friends that refuse to use Facebook so don't have WhatsApp. I have friends who are devoted to Apple and don't have anything other than iMessage. I have relations who don't have anything other than the built-in SMS app. I sometimes need to send these people photos of something.
- kimi 5y agoNot sure anybody ever used those. At -like- chf 1 a pop, they paved the way for WhatsApp to eat mobile telecom's lunch.
- marcus_cemes 5y agoMMS was terrible, however people are fine paying 70 CHF/month for unlimited mobile internet nowadays. I find this ridiculous, personally I'm trying to condition myself to only use the 100MB of free monthly data, stricly messaging only. It's a challenge.
- Leherenn 5y agoYou can rather easily get "unlimited" (as far as I know, pretty much every operator caps at 40 GB/month) internet (in Switzerland only) for 20 CHF/month nowadays.
- hocuspocus 5y agoExcept for very cheap MVNOs, no, there should be no cap with unlimited plans. You'll obviously suffer a bit from the QoS/prioritization but I know several people having no issues with unlimited 4G/5G from Salt, Yallo or Wingo.
- Leherenn 5y agoBoth my previous Yallo and my current Salt plans were unlimited, but restricted to 40GB before throttling in the terms and conditions. Maybe it has changed? (It's very hard to find detailed terms and conditions when looking at new contracts.)
- hocuspocus 5y agoI'm fairly certain Salt never enforced any throttling in practice, though it might be in the ToS? Recent deals from Yallo mention throttling when roaming, but not in Switzerland where unlimited is really unlimited.
- tannhaeuser 5y agoBefore dismissing MMS/SMS, consider it has an option for paid rich text messages and other media with carrier billing. Was used in the 90s for ringtones/backgrounds and such, but could be used for collecting subscriptions (mags, newsletters, literature). Of course, FAANG killed it (not least Google themselves with the convenient Stagefreight bug on Android), but I think we shouldn't sing FAANG's song here when the alternatives are closed, feudalistic ecosystems designed for ads such as FB's and Google's, or Apple's.
- tpush 5y agoI'd rather be in a closed, "feudalistic" ecosystem of Apple or Google than deal with any carrier.
- dotancohen 5y agoI'd rather not have messaging capabilities than expose my metadata to Facebook. MMS is great for communicating with people for whom "message" and "Whatsapp" are near-synonyms.
- can16358p 5y agoSame here. Not fan of Apple or Facebook as a company, but would definitely take their offer over anything that is plaintext and carrier-controlled. At least with iMessage or Messenger we have a way of sending encrypted messages of almost any format. (Clarification: not necessarily E2EE but at least encrypted to a non-carrier company)
- usr1106 5y agoFrom a non-US perspective: At least carriers are not US quasi monopolies. They do often obey local laws. (see today's Google analytic submission on HN if you don't know what I mean) And they provide interoperability. If my aunt uses another carrier than me I can still reach her. Of course carriers in the US are worse than elsewhere, so some people might have a stronger point like yours. I am in the lucky situation that e.g. SIM locking is illegal here.
- MarkusWandel 5y agoAt the low end of the spectrum ($10/month prepaid), at least in Canada, unlimited international SMS/MMS is part of the menu. It's gone from an overpriced premium feature to all the way down to the baseline. At about half a megabyte of payload, it works very well to send photos, voice clips, even videos (10-15 seconds, or the quality degrades too much), also contact cards. These days you have to actively resist Google upgrading you to their enhanced messenger app; once you have that picture messages will be sent using normal mobile data. It is a little known legacy feature even here. I find that about 80% of random phones have it provisioned correctly; for the rest it can be manually done by fiddling with the APN settings but virtually nobody knows how to do that.
- Nextgrid 5y agoThe problem is that the carriers are in control of it and you never know what you’re going to get at the end, if anything. The media may get recompressed several times along the way. The infrastructure involved is also ancient and poorly maintained, lots of “unknown unknowns” that can cause trouble.
- password4321 5y agoPardon my ignorance, but is there any app/client/software that takes the interference out of the equation by encrypting (or at least encoding) the content in transit? Doing so would be possible over vanilla SMS as well, I guess.
- afiori 5y agooriginally signal worked like this
- Nextgrid 5y agoIt could technically work, but then there's a chance that if your file (which is no longer JPEG) can't be parsed by the carrier's infrastructure it will simply reject it (or worse - crash it), so your encrypted file still needs to look like a valid image, but then your encoding scheme should be robust enough to survive being recompressed multiple times.
- memalign 5y agoIt’s worth noting that MMS is also how group messages are sent (SMS is 1:1 only). > The most popular messenger app in Switzerland and worldwide is WhatsApp. However, we do not recommend WhatsApp or Telegram for security reasons (problematic encryption and non-transparent data protection guidelines). But compared to MMS...
- zibzab 5y agoYeah, no end-to-end encryption and all that. But how many 0-days have been discovered in MMS? WhatsApp is starting to look like a TLA backdoor in comparison.
- AniseAbyss 5y agoEasier for government to infiltrate a local mobile operator than getting into WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal etc. The revolution will be WhatsApped.
- uf00lme 5y agoIt might be easier for local government to control telcos but much more difficult for a foreign government when compared to what might be a secret court warrant etc.
- AniseAbyss 5y agoIf your opponent is the US government you are already doomed.
- ChuckNorris89 5y ago>But how many 0-days have been discovered in MMS? WhatsApp is starting to look like a TLA backdoor in comparison. Your comparison doesn't make sense. MMS has no need for 0-days as it's a basic communication protocol that has zero security to begin with. That's like saying "but how many 0-days does TCP-IP have?"
- superlupo 5y agoI think that's a shame. Some of my contacts only have WhatsApp, and I am definitely not gonna install that Spyware. So to those, I am still sending pictures by MMS.
- hocuspocus 5y agoHopefully by 2023 the state of RCS will have improved.
- Arcanum-XIII 5y agoExcept most carrier don't want to implement it — it will need new investment in architecture, new bilateral negociation between operator, new routing partners... and it's backed by Google, which seems to not reassure anyone.
- zibzab 5y agoWell, with this move they simply will have to. Thankfully, it's not driven by Google, just "approved" by them. You don't want to use a Google technology for thinga you want to continue to exist 4 years from now.
- NovemberWhiskey 5y agoWhen you say it's not driven by Google - who exactly is pushing carriers to adopt RCS if not Google?
- hocuspocus 5y agoMany carriers already have. The main issue is that Google is steamrolling their own IaaS solution (Jibe) while some carriers (like Swisscom for instance) have actually implemented Universal Profile on their own, and are now left out.
- tssva 5y agoHow are they left out? If they have implemented Universal Profile they should be able to interoperate with those using Jibe's.
- billpg 5y agoOnce the services that charge transaction fees fall away, will the various free services that replaced them start charging for their service?
- muscaw 5y agoGiven SMSs bigger than 160 characters were sent as MMS, I wonder what will be the new UX in the SMS app when I reach the character limit. Will my SMS be sent into multiple chunks? Will my system tell me it's over the character limit?
- Hamuko 5y agoI thought that long messages were already chunked.
- daneel_w 5y agoYes, they are chunked (multi-part) SMSes, not MMSes.
- brirec 5y ago>Will my SMS be sent into multiple chunks? Yes. Actually, it already is. MMS is rarely used now for text-only messages, and instead concatenated messages is the norm. It does require network and OS support on both ends, however. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concatenated_SMS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concatenated_SMS
- daneel_w 5y agoSMS always had multi-part support (sometimes called "long SMS"), and that's what's used for sending long texts, not MMS.
- fetzu 5y agoI had never heard of the third app they suggest as a replacement (Teleguard), which is apparently also a Swiss product. Looking at their Privacy Policy[1], they make a suspiciously claim to not log anything. Not even payment information (whatever that means). Which makes me wonder how they combat fraud, spam and fake accounts. And, ultimately, the product being closed-source I guess you will just have to trust their claims.. just like WhatsApp and Telegram that Swisscom advises against for that same reason.[2] [1] https://teleguard.com/en/privacy https://teleguard.com/en/privacy [2] Actually, some parts of Telegram’s code is open source. Although it’s only the clients so the point about trust stands.
- AniseAbyss 5y agoNever used MMS and apparently it was discontinued in my country in 2019. HN hates WhatsApp but it was disruption with a giant fucking D visible from Mars.
- pessimizer 5y agoHN hates Facebook. WhatsApp was a fantastic service built on a fantastic stack by fantastic people.
- nextstep 5y ago>Using a messenger app >Download the app from the App Store (iPhone) or Google Play Store (Android phone) and register as advised. >Threema >Signal >TeleGuard >The most popular messenger app in Switzerland and worldwide is WhatsApp. However, we do not recommend WhatsApp or Telegram for security reasons (problematic encryption and non-transparent data protection guidelines). Well done, Swisscom!
- stabbles 5y agoSunrise (about 25% market share in Switzerland) sends out MMS messages with special offers to their customers on a regular basis
- Maxburn 5y agoI'm flabbergasted. This is going to royally mess up any android user trying to text an iphone user. Are they maybe trying to push apple to adopt RCS? I think we are still a good ways away from RCS working everywhere.
- netsharc 5y agoMost people in Europe use WhatsApp anyway...
- izacus 5y agoIt really doesn't. (I also fail to understand how giving ownership to Facebook for all messaging is somehow an improvement in Europe.)
- Maxburn 5y agoMaybe they took facebook money in order to drop support for MMS? Drive business to facebook. Profit!
- netsharc 5y agoHmm, I really don't think MMS is widely used in Switzerland. If Bob has an Android and wants to talk to Alice the iPhone user, Bob is not going to be SMS-ing/MMS-ing Alice, Bob will write Alice on WhatsApp (or Telegram, or Signal, the great WhatsApp-agree-to-our-new-EULA exodus also happened in Europe), which Alice will almost certainly have. Apple has no iMessage-moat in Europe. If you want to measure my certainty: I would bet 1000 Swiss Francs that if you went to the center of Zurich and asked 50 random people who have smartphones if they had one of WhatsApp/Signal/Telegram/Threema, they'd say yes.
- Arainach 5y agoAnd yet if you asked if they had all of them, almost no one would say so. I have friends who have quit Facebook, I have friends fully dedicated to the Apple ecosystem, I have one or two privacy-focused ones who use Signal, and no protocol other than MMS that can talk to all of them.
- apoland 5y agoIs it true that Swiss consumers do not use group texting features? I would think this would be a huge disruption if done in the US.
- gherkinnn 5y agoWhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram all have group chats and are very popular. iMessage is not really a thing, despite iOS substantial marketshare.
- sschueller 5y agoAnd Threema
- lxgr 5y agoYes, this is virtually unused in Europe. People mostly use OTT messengers like WhatsApp, Signal etc.
- mellowagain 5y agoThis is honestly not a big deal in Switzerland. Almost everyone here uses messengers such as WhatsApp or Telegram. I personally never had any SMS/MMS contact with any person in the past two years since I've had my phone. What people need to understand is that once Swisscom decides something, people are going to migrate. Swisscom disabled the 2G network at the start of 2021 and people which still had old "dumb" phones migrated either over to smart or feature phones, which both support messengers such as WhatsApp. Swisscom realized this and is now getting rid of a feature that was practically unused, making their tech stack simpler. Totally understandable and most likely not a big loss for anyone except a few.
- _trampeltier 5y agoI'm from Switzerland and don't use WhatsApp because of Facebook. So I have to contact with some people just over SMS/MMS.
- Notanothertoo 5y agoSignal
- emsy 5y agoFax them a complaint.
- yumraj 5y agoI'm in the US and don't use WhatsApp because of Facebook. I use SMS, Signal and iMessage.
- thisfro 5y agoSignal or threema are no options for you?
- yumraj 5y agoHad never heard of threema, so had to look it up. Looks interesting, a little like ICQ it seems.. Have always wondered if ICQ should make a comeback, so good to see something like it exists.
- Animats 5y agoThat's annoying. The basic SMS app on Android will convert long messages to MMS. It's good to have a message service which has no ads, no charges, no signup, and no EULA. It's provided entirely by a regulated telecom regulator. No nonsense.
- devoutsalsa 5y agoOne data point. I’m an American that has been traveling since late 2019, primarily in Europe and Latin America. I almost always get a local SIM in pick-a-country. The only thing I use SMS for is paying for parking, 2FA, and texting friends in America. Almost everything else is WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger. On occasion I bump into someone who prefers Telegram.
- samkone 5y agoI want to discontinue Swisscom overall.
- Yetino 5y agoIt feels counterintuitive that the competition from WhatsApp, iMessage, etc, never managed to bring down the price of MMS. Any ideas?
- spacexsucks 5y agoTo all the people singin praises of their feudalistic closed privacy apps, the EARN IT bill is attempting to legislate away that privacy. At least with MMS it all just works