Telesp Celular, a subsidiary of Portugal Telecom and a leading wireless operator in South America together with CMG, a leader in messaging solutions, have successfully conducted multimedia messaging tests in Brazil over a 2.5G CDMA 1xRTT network. Multimedia Messaging Services (MMS) enable wireless carriers to offer messaging that includes photographs, images, animation, sound and texts.
Dick Blom, president CMG in Latin America, said that this is the first successful MMS testing over such networks in the world. "The test once again confirms CMG's capability to work with all 2G technologies (TDMA, CDMA, GSM) and their evolution to 2.5G and 3G. This is a milestone for both companies," he said.
Carlos Vasconcellos, president Telesp Celular, said that the project is extremely important and strengthens Telesp Celular policy of developing products and services in an innovative fashion to meet the individual needs of users and companies. "The high-speed mobile Internet will cause a vast impact on the market changing the way companies do business and provide individual customers with convenience. This translates into user-friendly services that facilitate communication among people and provide access to services that save time for customers," said Vasconcellos.
Telesp Celular, a pioneer in Brazil and Latin America in 2.5G wireless data services, was chosen for the soft launch of MMS because the operator is a leader and a benchmark in mobile data services in Brazil. "The company has a history in innovations that is respected not only in Brazil but also around the world," said Blom. He further states that he intends to replicate the success here in Brazil that CMG has with Portugal Telecom in Europe.

Revenue Generation

MMS is the natural evolution of SMS (Short Message Service), a service that today could account for up to 28% of operators' revenues and is therefore the most lucrative mobile data service today. As MMS offers more versatile and advanced multimedia interactivity, it will meet mobile user's needs in an improved fashion: expand operator's modality and experience in the service and therefore their revenues.
MMS creates a limitless set of new opportunities for content and advertisement providers to offer carriers more rich premium priced services directed to specific targeted and segmented markets and bill it individually. The bandwidth of 2.5G (CDMA 1xRTT and GPRS) and 3G networks is desperately needed, as the capacity requirement of content of many highly interested users is becoming ever more demanding.
CMG president for Latin America, Blom pointed out that competition is increasingly tougher and operators urge for higher data ARPU to make it possible to pay the investments they have made in infrastructure. Thus, MMS acquires a greater importance as a significant value-added service to generate revenues.