on November 13, 2009 by denpras in Messaging / SMS, Comments (2)

SMS VS EMS VS MMS

Who doesnt know about SMS ? SMS and voice is most important services in a mobile operator. SMS is now the most successful wireless service. In 2002, 90 billion message were sent all over the country, which brought much benefit for the carriers, and convenience for the terminal users. But SMS still has its shortcomings: short, which limits the information obtained by the user.

We already learnt about SMS, why SMS has 160 characters limitation per one message. Now there is another services beside SMS which over and extend the SMS advantages.
So messaging is evolving technology and developed by vendors whole the worlds.
As the construction of the new network GPRS/CDMA/3G which has more bandwidth and capacity, user can obtain information not only through the signaling path, but also through these new technologies such as EMS and MMS.

Since SMS created in the beginning of 1992, vendors developed for EMS(Enhances Message Services ) for image text information sending in 2000, and MMS ( Multimedia Messaging Services ) for sending Multimedia data information in 2002.

Here are the comparison of them, we can see the improvement and advantages from each technology :

Item	SMS	EMS	MMS
Media type	Text	Text, simple picture and ring	Text, static picture, video segment, audio segment, animation
Message size	140Byte	34170 Byte	Typically 30K~100K Byte, not limited theoretically
Bear mode	NO.7	NO.7	WAP/IP
Schedule mode	Store forward	Store forward	Store and forward
Protocol	SMPP	SMPP	WAP, HTTP and SMTP etc.
Addressing mode	MSISDN	MSISDN	Email, MSISDN
Terminal	Common handset	EMS handset	MMS handset
sent to recipient message center	No	No	Yes
sent to MS directly	Yes	Yes	No, MMSC sends message notification, and then the user retrieves the message.

As you can see in the above table, MMS can accomodate and support what SMS and EMS offers. It can send information in text mode, image for format like JPEF, GIF, BMP, JPEG 2000 etc, audio format like mp3, amr, MIDI, wav. MMS can also send information in video format like MPEG4 and quicktime.
In the end, MMS can support sending informatiom combining format mentioned above.
So what we’ve to do if we want to implement such a technology like EMS and MMS beside of basic services like SMS ? what its concequences ?
The concequences is we have to develop more strong network in our company.
You can see how many bytes we should handle if we send EMS and MMS ?
Eventhough SMS has extend services like long SMS or concatenated SMS which use UDH to implement, we must upgrade our network and infrastructure before implementing them. we will discuss further for the next posting about messaging technology.
High quality products start from good network quality of services. The result is subscriber satisfaction, that is one term an operator aim. !