Assessing the Future Withdrawal of UK Mobile MMS Picture Messaging

An important development recently happened in Germany as mobile operators switched off the Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS), which meant that users would in future be limited to sending pictures, short videos and audio files to other mobile phone users via internet-based messaging platforms (RCS, WhatsApp, iMessage etc.). But this raises the question, when might the UK follow?

The commercial deployment of MMS started around 2002 and only really became popular alongside the introduction of 3G mobile services a year later, which were much better at being able to send such data over nascent mobile broadband connectivity. Unlike regular SMS (text messaging), MMS also allowed users to send media content like pictures.

Despite this, MMS could be quite restrictive (character and file size limits etc.) and sending an individual message via the cellular network was often far from cheap. Even accidentally sending an emoji alongside your text message, which would often convert it to an MMS, could sometimes rack up quite a bill if such messaging wasn’t included in your plan (this caused plenty of annoyance).

However, the service quickly found itself competing for user attention with internet-based (IP) messaging platforms, which became much more viable as mobile data prices dropped. Services like RCS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and so forth have grown significantly over the past decade or so and don’t suffer the same limitations. Suffice to say that MMS has largely been eclipsed by those IP-based platforms.

Dario Betti, CEO of the Mobile Ecosystem Forum (MEF), told ISPreview:

“UK mobile operators including Vodafone UK, O2 UK, EE and Three continue to support MMS, meaning that it is still available for certain consumer and enterprise use cases.

The UK has a strong CPaaS [Communications Platforms as a Service] ecosystem, advanced A2P [Application-to-Person] messaging market and also increasing adoption of RCS Business Messaging. This means that operators are likely to take a more commercially driven approach to any future migration from MMS. Germany’s experience gives us a useful case study which demonstrates both the opportunities and risks associated with retiring legacy messaging services.

For UK operators, the key lesson is not simply whether MMS should eventually be switched off, but whether the industry has built a sufficiently robust RCS, CPaaS and AI-powered messaging ecosystem to replace the reach, reliability and revenue that legacy services currently still provide.”

Crucially it’s unclear how many people still use MMS in the UK (personally I have only sent a single MMS in the last decade) and thus it’s difficult to gauge the real-world economic impact of its potential removal. ISPreview did contact EE, O2 and VodafoneThree to query what they thought about the change in Germany and when the UK might follow suit.

At the time of writing only O2 has responded. A spokesperson for the operator said they couldn’t rule out switching off MMS “one day in the future“, but they currently have “no active plans” to retire it. Regular readers will know that we always take any mention of “no plans” with a pinch of salt, as plans can and often do change, frequently at short notice. We suspect O2’s position will be the same for EE and VodafoneThree.

As for Germany, by the time mobile operators pulled the plug MMS usage had already plummeted by over 96% from its 2012 peak. German mobile users had already long abandoned the service. The operators that turned the service off also saved money on costly licensing fees, reduced backend maintenance, fewer customer support issues and so forth.