The future of MMS looks brighter every day. On a global level, compared with 2004, MMS revenue is expected to more than double during 2005. Reaching critical mass (25 percent penetration) for MMS-enabled handsets is one explanation for the rise, another is the introduction of automatically configured or pre-configured mobile phones that remove yet another barrier for end users.

When MMS started there were huge expectations for this new way of communicating. But since its European launch in 2002, it has not lived up to the hopes. One of the mobile industry's mistakes was simply comparing it to SMS, thinking that MMS would replace text messages. Today, several investigations show that in reality MMS is used as a complement to SMS during person-to-person communication, giving superior capability to share emotions and moments.

Anders Erlandsson, solution marketing manager at Ericsson's Product Area Service Layer, says the industry had extremely high expectations when launching the service. "Sending MMS, on a personal level, is mostly about sharing moments and visualizing happenings. You do not chat with MMS. Still, when the moment is right a picture says more than a thousand words. And people want to share," he says.

Three criteria need to be fulfilled for any new service to succeed: the technology has to work end-to-end with high interoperability and reliability; critical mass in regards to penetration – end users that actually have the right device to enable the service – must be achieved; and traffic-generating activities need to be undertaken by operators and content providers.

For most European countries this is now the case: penetration is around 40 percent and the market is ready to take off. Operators now offer deals such as "Free MMS during the weekend," which have resulted in a rapid increase in both awareness and traffic.

"It is obvious that these three criteria are of great importance," Erlandsson says. "Just look at the North American market, where mobile-to-mobile MMS is yet to take off mainly due to problems with interoperability. The agreements between operators have not been in place which means end users with different operators could not send MMSs between themselves."

Meanwhile, demand for message services in general and especially MMS are growing in Russia and Africa, while usage in Asia and Europe is rising constantly. New applications that make both end users' lives easier and operator costs cheaper are about to be launched.

"Today you have to call up your voicemail to listen to the messages. Soon, operators can just send an MMS to you with the voice message included. It would actually be cheaper for operators to do so instead of letting end users take capacity from the network by dialing up themselves," Erlandsson says.

Other areas where operators can gain money through MMS are using the MMS interface for advertising, information and infotainment through video and TV spots. Definitely cheaper than marketing material via snail-mail, the further advantage is a much higher hit rate. Put simply, MMS enables interaction – a dialogue – between operators or content providers and the end users. Together with future handsets this dialogue – and the ones between end users – will be even more efficient.

"The challenge now is the next generation of messaging that will offer operators a horizontal multimedia network and end users devices with a common interface for whatever messaging service they might want to use. The future mobile phones will sense themselves what kind of message you are about to send," Erlandsson says.

In 2008, MMS-enabled phones are expected to reach a penetration rate of about 65 percent, creating about 210 million active users and up to USD 10 billion in revenue for person-to-person traffic alone.

Ericsson is considered the market leader in mobile messaging with a complete end-to-end offering for MMS, voicemail, video mail, e-mail, SMS and instant messaging. At the end of June, Ericsson signed its 100th MMS contract.