“If MMS is going to be as successful as SMS, we need to find and develop broad content,” says Magnus Ahlberg, Head of Business Sales at Swedish operator 3. “Narrow content is something that would work on a mature market, not on a young MMS market.”

Ahlberg says the great potential for boosting MMS lies with the enterprise segment. With 3G, companies can lower their telephony costs, which will open up a new market with services such as financial information, access to e-mail and calendar, location-based services and so on. This means companies will be able to communicate with staff who work out in the field or on the factory floor and do not have access to a computer.

The obstacles to firing up the MMS market are the price of handsets and the low number of people who actually use mobile services. “I think that in the future the price of the handsets will decrease thanks to the economy of scale in production within the global standard UMTS,” Ahlberg says.

Most users do not know the full potential of mobile technology so it is up to operators and content providers to show them all the possibilities. Configuration problems and other technology issues must also be solved before taking services to the next level.

As soon as 3G is fully rolled out, Sweden will stand out from the rest of Europe, Ahlberg says. It will have a network covering the whole country, providing endless possibilities for high-quality content.

Ahlberg also considers small stakeholders to be the most innovative. “If you take Sweden as an example, until not long ago we only had one big telecommunications operator and because it had always been the sole supplier, it did not have to exert itself to get customers and did not have to be innovative,” Ahlberg says.

Ahlberg calls 3 the third screen after TV and computers. He also compares 3 to a grocery store that starts by selling its own branded content, then expands to sell other brands as well as its own.

“We should not do everything by ourselves,” he says. “Instead, we should team up with experts and cooperate with each other. There will always be a partner who does things better then we do.”

Karin Hanson