Enhanced functionality for Airgate MMS gateway

Edited by the Marketingservicestalk editorial team Dec 18, 2008

Airwide Solutions has announced enhanced MMS functionality for the Airgate MMS messaging gateway.

The enhanced MMS Direct Delivery functionality is designed to help operators grow their MMS business by enabling them to support high-value, performance-intensive MMS applications, participate in mobile marketing and support the convergence of mobile with internet with social networking.

In answer to increasing demand for application-to-person (A2P) and person-to-application (P2A) MMS applications, such as goal alerts and mobile marketing, Airwide has enhanced the MMS functionality of its Airgate offering to provide a low-cost way for operators to support this demand while improving performance and QoS for all forms of MMS messaging.

These enhancements extend the feature-rich connectivity and service management facets of the product with high-performance A2P MMS delivery, providing a cost-effective solution to the growing need for separately scalable A2P MMS capacity.

Together with the campaign and reporting capabilities of Airgate, Airwide's messaging gateway enables a variety of new A2P MMS business opportunities ranging from mobile marketing campaigns to content services to social networking and user-generated content.

Application-oriented MMS represents a good opportunity for operators because key requirements for application-oriented multimedia services have fallen into place in many markets worldwide: MMS-capable handset penetration is at or above 95 per cent in many developed markets such as North America, western Europe and south east Asia.

Attractive pricing and creative service bundling approaches are making MMS affordable for the mass market Interoperability agreements are in place so that mobile operators can enable interworking between multiple carriers.

Subscribers, content providers and brands now recognise the potential and maturity of MMS as a medium.

Web 2.0 services like blogging, user-generated content and mobile marketing/advertising have created a need among consumers and brands for a ubiquitous medium for multimedia messaging As a result of these key requirements finally being in place, MMS has been gaining momentum and shifting from a vision of the future to a real-world capability that can differentiate mobile operators and increase subscriber loyalty through rich multimedia services.

Person-to-person (P2P) traffic in markets such as North America, Asia, and eastern Europe is experiencing torrid growth, and other markets - such as countries in western Europe - are also showing signs of significant growth.

Mobile operators are also now finding that A2P and P2A MMS can stimulate high-value services as well as incremental person-to-person (P2P) MMS uptake.

A2P MMS is frequently used in educational and marketing campaigns, as well as multimedia alerts, and services are being created to stimulate viral adoption.

The advantages of using Airgate MMS for the direct delivery to handsets of application-oriented MMS messages include reducing costs by avoiding the expensive legacy licensing and hardware costs associated with conventional MMSCs and providing a superior user experience by segregating application traffic from person to person MMS traffic.

The enhanced feature set meets customer and industry demand by providing high-performance, separately scalable components for the messaging and mobile internet challenges operators are facing today.

Enabling the MMS direct-delivery capability of the Airgate gateway provides an easy and cost-effective way to support application-oriented MMS traffic for operators.