Pricing Vital for MMS Sucess

MMS offers mobile operators their first real hope for making money from the mass market with 2.5G and 3G networks. They need MMS to take off in a big way and as quickly as possible. A key means of achieving this is to make it affordable. The cheaper it is to buy MMS-capable handsets, and to send MMS messages, the more rapidly service usage will take off. However Ovum, the analyst and consulting company, warns that there are limits on how far operators can go in this direction.

The early MMS handsets on the market are expensive. Ericsson's T68i retails at around US$500, including camera, and Nokia's 7650 is about US$700. On top of this, subscribers need to activate a GPRS subscription before they can even start using MMS.

John Delaney, Principal analyst at Ovum explains "If operators want to get things moving quickly with MMS they have to consider subsidies. Vodafone in the UK, for example, intends to offer the Ericsson T68i, with the clip-on Communicam, to its MMS subscribers at around euro315 (

Posted to the site on 29th July 2002