hellkvist.org

[dusan]

Hi Stephan,
I have no specific knowledge on MMS. But I know that reading (watching) MMS on mobile phone is simpler than reading e-mail attachment on mobile phone. From set-up and from user interface point of view.
The functionality I would like to achieve is to write and web-based application which will enable to send MMS to a mobile phone which supports receiving MMS.
What is the operators role in this process ?
Is it operator independat ?
Is it roaming consistent (sending MMS from Spain to Norway) ?
Does your software written in PHP make this things to happen ?

Regards Dusan

[Peffis]

In order to send an MMS you need to
1) Encode the content into one file (the format specification can be downloaded from wapforum)

2) Place the encoded file on a webserver so that it can be accessed from the Internet, say http://peffis.com/message.mms

3) Send out the URL to the message (the http://peffis.com...) in a special binary SMS.

4) The phone will upon receiving the SMS initiate a download of the message and present it in the phone


All these things could in theory be done operator free. Web servers there are plenty of and SMS you can send with a phone attached to the serial cable on your PC for instance (or through a proper SMSC if you prefer). I say in theory though because operators are in general not willing to accept this situation as it bypasses their system - thus they cannot charge you for it. So with the settings people have in a phone for MMS they cannot in general access any web server to download the mms from. The message has to be placed on the operator's MMSC for that to work.

What this leads to is that, if you want an app to work so that it can distribute to any customer, then you would have to talk to an operator that has cooperations with as many other operator as possible and send the MMS through their system. Operators sign contracts of MMS relaying so that they can share MMS:es between different networks.

So in practice it's not possible to do it without an operator.

[zache]

[Peffis]

Well, there is one phone that allows this - the SonyEricsson T68i. With that one you can download an MMS directly in the wap browser and it will be displayed in the phone as an MMS.

Later they discovered that this is bad since people would be able to avoid paying the operators if MMS could be received this way. And since phone manufacturers and operators work hand in hand they decided to block this option in future phones.

If you implement an MMS reader in say Java on a Java enabled phone (such as the K700i or P9xx you can of course do what you want...but then you might also like to abandon the MMS format altogether as there really is no reason to do it that difficult then.

[relix]

Using the JSR 120 Wireless Msg API, is it possible for a Java app to send an SMS to yourself without interaction of the Operator's SMS Server?

Using the Push Registry one could then let the Java app execute every 10 minutes or so, let it check a URL (php script) for new messages, and load the data needed to create a valid binary SMS to those MMS messages. It could then send those SMS messages to itself, so that the phone receives the messages.

Possible?

[Peffis]

Interesting idea, but I doubt the API allows it. They have been VERY careful to avoid cutting off revenue shares for the operators when designing the phones and the Java API's. Like for instance, in the beginning there was a version of SonyEricsson T68 where you could access content on a web server through the wap browser and, when it found that it was of mms content type it passed it over to the MMS software on the phone and it downloaded it. This was removed so that free MMS services could not be developed using some polling mechanism or something. For the operator's it's all about getting the customers money you know and the phone manufacturers' customers are the operators so they walk hand in hand in this.