Swisscom customers share memorable moments using a reliable, scalable multimedia messaging service.
Today, Swisscom operates an MMS service that delivers more than 90 messages per second during peak periods such as public holidays.
The company is able to deliver more messages than its competitors and saw a 20 percent growth in traffic during 2010 alone, resulting in 70 million multimedia messages sent over the year.
Emerging technology
In 2001, Swisscom identified a rising demand for MMS capability. That year, it began working with Ericsson to develop a system that would meet future needs, as well as reflecting the quality of service that its brand promises.
In 2002, Swisscom became the country’s first operator to offer MMS and the first message was sent from one of its customers to another in October.
Experiencing the event
Armin Lisibach, Product Manager MMS, Swisscom believes that for the Swiss, picture messaging is more than just a novelty: “99 percent of people just want to send a single picture of an emotional event to friends and family. It is very important to Swiss people that a message can be received very fast and in very good resolution. This allows their friends to feel the emotional event with them, as well as enabling them to do things such as printing and posting on social media.”
Developing reliable systems
Historically, MMS systems had faced many challenges, such as compatibility between networks. This often meant that messages would be delayed, unreadable, or lost altogether. Swisscom and Ericsson worked together to develop a reliable service that would enable high resolution images to be sent and received from any network.
Ericsson provided a highly customized dual-redundancy Multimedia Messaging Service Center (MMSC) that was integrated into Swisscom’s existing high-quality network, which is also provided by Ericsson. This allowed it to receive media from a wide range of networks.
According to Michael Kauz, Head of Value Added Services, Swisscom, delivering a high quality user experience was key to gaining customer confidence: “The key components for the platform were reliability and interoperability. We made everything technically possible to ensure that customers who send MMS can also be sure they will arrive. We have many international working agreements with other networks to ensure delivery of messages worldwide.”
Continued improvements
Armin Lisibach explains how the operator continues to make improvements to the service: “Every year we make upgrades which enable the customer to better ‘feel’ their pictures, such as improved resolution. We are also providing more handsets that feature high-resolution messaging.”
Currently Swisscom sends and displays images up to 300kB. The company is working with Ericsson to enable its customers to send up to 1GB, as well as resizing larger messages from other networks to ensure compatibility.
Sébastien Mock, Swisscom Account Manager, Ericsson sees the future MMS market as a tough fight for operators, but also as an area of growth, as messages will be able to be delivered to a wider range of devices: “We have a very interesting initiative now in Europe with the ‘big five’ [leading European mobile operators], for rich communication (RCSe). The operator will have the capability to continue delivering any messages, to any devices, anywhere worldwide. Nobody else will be able to do that and they have to leverage on this asset, and that for me is the future of the messaging platform.”
