February 01, 2005

By: Mark Harris
Website: http://www.cell-phones-n-plans.com

Intercarrier Multimedia Messaging Services – ATT Wireless And Cingular Tie Up For Sharing Of MMS

AT&T Wireless and Cingular Wireless, two leading wireless carriers have reached an agreement to offer intercarrier Multimedia Messaging Services (MMS). Subscribers using any of these two service providers can share multimedia messages and video messaging with each other.

This agreement will enable the AT&T and Cingular Wireless service providers to avail AT&T text messages service and Multimedia Messaging Services and share photos, animated graphics messages, voice messages, music and video clips with each other. Subscribers having mobile phones with inbuilt camera can capture memorable moments of their life and share them with their friends and relatives having Multimedia Messaging Services compatible mobile phones.

As text messages has seen a major growth in the past two years, company officials feel that this intercarrier agreement will also see a tremendous growth potential of the intercarrier messaging services in the near future and may broaden the scope of the text and multimedia messages. Officials also feel that this may lead to sharing of text and intercarrier multimedia messages among all the mobile service providers of the industry in the future.

ATT Wireless Communications was the first company to start cross carrier text message services and Multimedia Messaging Services enabled camera phones in the United States. The company wants the customers to share Multimedia messages just like SMS text messaging, among all the carriers.

Cingular Wireless is a joint venture between SBC Communications and BellSouth. Being the largest provider of GSM services in the US, it has a voice and data customer base of 25 million across the United States. It is also the first company in the world to deploy wireless services commercially using Enhanced Data rates for GSM Evolution (EDGE) technology.

If considered on the basis of revenues, AT&T Wireless is the second largest wireless carrier in the US. As on June 30, 2004, it has 21.737 million subscribers and revenue for the previous four quarters was $16.8 billion.

Also see; wireless phone carriers.

Author Notes:

Mark Harris contributes and publishes news editorial to http://www.cell-phones-n-plans.com.  A cellular phone industry resource featuring service plan comparisons, cell phone reviews and informative articles.