3 ms·

MMS' where ridiculously expensive when they came out. 2-3 times a regular text message wouldn't do it. On top of that, MMS was janky AF (probably still is. I d

MMS' where ridiculously expensive when they came out. 2-3 times a regular text message wouldn't do it. On top of that, MMS was janky AF (probably still is. I don't know anyone who uses them on purpose). Unclear if receiver could receive your message. If they couldn't, you still had to pay. Sometimes they'd receive a link instead of a picture, sometimes just junk. Pictures where already pretty lousy straight off the phone, but after a trip through MMS they where just terrible. On top of that, pictures were excruciatingly difficult to get off your phone. I'm not saying the first few iPhones had great cameras, but they did make it relatively easy to move your pictures to your computer and from there to flickr. With the eventual app-store, wi-fi connection made it cost-effective and easy to upload to the web straight from your phone. And chat apps made it reasonable to send pictures from phone to phone.

Gravityloss 4y ago
This was because operators wanted the cash flow. SMS was a goldmine. So naturally they tried to get in on the MMS. The operators were also really bad in producing any kind of services that customers wanted. The WAP era was full of applications that nobody used, like "get a poem for a lady". I think they cost per use. Really short sighted. But operators didn't have the kind of thinking or resources required. In Europe we already had free data plans earlier and people used web pages and sent email etc. For USA that mostly came with the iphone. Applications, a software company doing it, with the app store and ecosystem with developers free to do what they wanted was a much better model.
- wodenokoto 4y ago
  _free_ dataplans in 2006? Is in "all you can use" data at a fixed price? I haven't seen that anywhere ever. Europe, Asia, middle east. Back in 06, I could buy a $5 add-on to stream Youtube on my 3 subscription, but the handsets were so terrible, the thought of doing that never occurred to me. I had a 1 month subscription to music streaming on my 3 handset and it drained the phone battery within an hour. I could access wikipedia to fact check people as a party trick in 06, but 3g still didn't feel on par with the 2g data services that Docomo and AU had been offering in Japan years before.
  - jrimbault 4y ago
    Not 2006, but in 2007 (in France, I was 15) you could get unlimited calls, sms and mms (and a generous data cap I can't remember the details of, but it was in the gigabytes), for a fixed monthly price. That wasn't the subscription I had, it was some tier above mine.
  - wwtrv 4y ago
    I recall (in a European country) a brief time window around then when you indeed could a get an unlimited plan rather cheaply. There were no restriction on tethering either so you could get unlimited data on your laptop. Considering how low GPRS/EDGE bandwidth was (and that only a very limited number of people probably did this) the operators probably didn't mind, they added caps pretty soon after '3G' came out.
    - herbst 4y ago
      Can confirm. Not sure where the actual caps were but it was basically free to use for me as a teenager
    - wodenokoto 4y ago
      Now that you mention it, I actually seem to remember that most plans nowadays are limitless in the same sense: When you've spent you 4 or 10gb, you simply "run out" of 3/4g data and start using data speed limited to essentially 2g, which is unlimited.
  - kalleboo 4y ago
    In Sweden we had it around that period, I was a subscriber. With HSDPA rolling out but everyone carrying WAP-capable features phones, the operators had lots of capacity but couldn't figure out how to use all that bandwidth. Once the iPhone and other smartphones caught on those plans all disappeared. Now they're back again with LTE-A/5G.
  - p_l 4y ago
    What Americans call "unlimited", I used as, the only way to get Internet at home between 2005 and 2008. It was an early offering reasonably priced - I had spotty reception though so telnet/ssh and later mosh were the name of the game. Used shell account on high school servers to run torrents etc. Made Sun's offer to send you NetBeans and Solaris DVDs for free way more interesting.
- usrusr 4y ago
  “because operators wanted the cash flow“ It's impossible to put too much emphasis on this part. The envisioned MMS money deluge never happened (at least outside Japan? I have zero understanding of market history there), but it was the sole reason that suddenly all phones had cameras. In those days network operators were still the almost exclusive sales channel for phone hardware, so if they decided that phones without camera would not sell, that's what happened. Even if no consumer actually wanted that feature. I really believe that in an alternative history where the SMS goldmine never happened (and thus no MMS goldmine illusions) it's possible (though not likely?) that we might still use dedicated hardware for image capture. And in that case, given the political implications of "every person always has a camera with them", world history would be meaningfully different, just because its past does not contain that future that never happened (MMS goldmine).
- pjc50 4y ago
  Yes. People bemoaning the ad-supported free-at-point of use Internet should be aware that a lot of companies wanted a much worse nickel-and-dime walled garden. It has been a great positive feature of the Internet that it doesn't include a billing mechanism.
kanisae 4y ago
I owned MMS platform for a carrier back in the day. Everything about it was janky. "Hey let's emulate SMTP commands but over HTTP and then try to track all the different models of phones to transcribe images so they can kinda sorta interopate" Thenb you got to watch the huge queue build up every Christmas morning and New Years as the inter carrier brokers got backed up hours. All in all, not my favorite carrier app to manage.
- usrusr 4y ago
  Heh, thank you for that perspective, really interesting to see that it did not only fail from completely off the charts expectations based on extrapolating from the SMS outlier.
arpa 4y ago
MMS actually work now as everyone has data on the phone. Ten years back, MMS was crap.
- neurostimulant 4y ago
  Sending MMS internationally is still hit and miss. There is a reason whatsapp replaced MMS for most people (outside the US).

Gravityloss 4y ago

This was because operators wanted the cash flow. SMS was a goldmine. So naturally they tried to get in on the MMS. The operators were also really bad in producing any kind of services that customers wanted. The WAP era was full of applications that nobody used, like "get a poem for a lady". I think they cost per use. Really short sighted. But operators didn't have the kind of thinking or resources required. In Europe we already had free data plans earlier and people used web pages and sent email etc. For USA that mostly came with the iphone. Applications, a software company doing it, with the app store and ecosystem with developers free to do what they wanted was a much better model.

wodenokoto 4y ago
_free_ dataplans in 2006? Is in "all you can use" data at a fixed price? I haven't seen that anywhere ever. Europe, Asia, middle east. Back in 06, I could buy a $5 add-on to stream Youtube on my 3 subscription, but the handsets were so terrible, the thought of doing that never occurred to me. I had a 1 month subscription to music streaming on my 3 handset and it drained the phone battery within an hour. I could access wikipedia to fact check people as a party trick in 06, but 3g still didn't feel on par with the 2g data services that Docomo and AU had been offering in Japan years before.
- jrimbault 4y ago
  Not 2006, but in 2007 (in France, I was 15) you could get unlimited calls, sms and mms (and a generous data cap I can't remember the details of, but it was in the gigabytes), for a fixed monthly price. That wasn't the subscription I had, it was some tier above mine.
- wwtrv 4y ago
  I recall (in a European country) a brief time window around then when you indeed could a get an unlimited plan rather cheaply. There were no restriction on tethering either so you could get unlimited data on your laptop. Considering how low GPRS/EDGE bandwidth was (and that only a very limited number of people probably did this) the operators probably didn't mind, they added caps pretty soon after '3G' came out.
  - herbst 4y ago
    Can confirm. Not sure where the actual caps were but it was basically free to use for me as a teenager
  - wodenokoto 4y ago
    Now that you mention it, I actually seem to remember that most plans nowadays are limitless in the same sense: When you've spent you 4 or 10gb, you simply "run out" of 3/4g data and start using data speed limited to essentially 2g, which is unlimited.
- kalleboo 4y ago
  In Sweden we had it around that period, I was a subscriber. With HSDPA rolling out but everyone carrying WAP-capable features phones, the operators had lots of capacity but couldn't figure out how to use all that bandwidth. Once the iPhone and other smartphones caught on those plans all disappeared. Now they're back again with LTE-A/5G.
- p_l 4y ago
  What Americans call "unlimited", I used as, the only way to get Internet at home between 2005 and 2008. It was an early offering reasonably priced - I had spotty reception though so telnet/ssh and later mosh were the name of the game. Used shell account on high school servers to run torrents etc. Made Sun's offer to send you NetBeans and Solaris DVDs for free way more interesting.
usrusr 4y ago
“because operators wanted the cash flow“ It's impossible to put too much emphasis on this part. The envisioned MMS money deluge never happened (at least outside Japan? I have zero understanding of market history there), but it was the sole reason that suddenly all phones had cameras. In those days network operators were still the almost exclusive sales channel for phone hardware, so if they decided that phones without camera would not sell, that's what happened. Even if no consumer actually wanted that feature. I really believe that in an alternative history where the SMS goldmine never happened (and thus no MMS goldmine illusions) it's possible (though not likely?) that we might still use dedicated hardware for image capture. And in that case, given the political implications of "every person always has a camera with them", world history would be meaningfully different, just because its past does not contain that future that never happened (MMS goldmine).
pjc50 4y ago
Yes. People bemoaning the ad-supported free-at-point of use Internet should be aware that a lot of companies wanted a much worse nickel-and-dime walled garden. It has been a great positive feature of the Internet that it doesn't include a billing mechanism.

kanisae 4y ago

I owned MMS platform for a carrier back in the day. Everything about it was janky. "Hey let's emulate SMTP commands but over HTTP and then try to track all the different models of phones to transcribe images so they can kinda sorta interopate" Thenb you got to watch the huge queue build up every Christmas morning and New Years as the inter carrier brokers got backed up hours. All in all, not my favorite carrier app to manage.

usrusr 4y ago
Heh, thank you for that perspective, really interesting to see that it did not only fail from completely off the charts expectations based on extrapolating from the SMS outlier.

arpa 4y ago

MMS actually work now as everyone has data on the phone. Ten years back, MMS was crap.

neurostimulant 4y ago
Sending MMS internationally is still hit and miss. There is a reason whatsapp replaced MMS for most people (outside the US).