MMS: Vodafone will turn off MMS on January 17, 2023

Vodafone will shut down the multimedia messaging service, known as MMS, on January 17, 2023, after only a small portion of MMS sent at weddings is already on the provider’s network. Services like WhatsApp, Signal, and iMessage have long taken over. However, the old SMS remains active.

MMS is a further development of SMS (Short Message Service) and later EMS (Enhanced Message Service) and comes from a time before data services are commonly used today. With EMS, messages longer than 160 characters and small images could be sent as icons, but it was MMS that made it possible to send images, short videos, and documents on early multimedia phones. The specification does not stipulate a size limit, but practically all German network operators limit MMS to 300 KB, which leads to forced transcoding on the device and lower quality of photos and videos.

Business clients with the option to continue

Nowadays, on the other hand, many gigabytes can easily be transferred in one session via smartphone to all regions of the world, so that MMS hardly plays a role in the network. Therefore, service at Vodafone will be discontinued completely on January 17, 2023. Only business customers can negotiate separate terms.

Always under sms

MMS reached its peak for Vodafone in December 2012, when 13 million MMS messages were sent within a month. For comparison: in the same month 1.5 billion text messages were sent. December has always been the busiest month for MMS in all these years, as Vodafone explains today. But the company currently only counts 5% of past traffic and therefore 650,000 MMS per month. Vodafone assumes that the number of multimedia messages sent per month will continue to decline, so that after the shutdown there will be no need in about two years.

SMS keep quiet

On the other hand, it looks completely different with SMS, which Vodafone will continue to adhere to. the “The SMS service operates independently of the MMS service and will be able to relax and celebrate its 30th anniversary in December 2022‘, explains Vodafone, which means anything but an early ending. Vodafone recently sold its first-ever SMS sent since 1992 in the form of a non-fungible token (NFT).

ComputerBase received information about this article from Vodafone under the NDA. The only requirement was as soon as possible to publish.