Vodafone will stop sending multimedia messaging service messages tomorrow, January 17, 2023. The discontinuation of the MMS offer is not a surprise, since Vodafone had already announced it at the end of 2021.

Vodafone introduced MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) in Germany in April 2002. At the time, MMS was the only way to send pictures and photos via mobile phone. Music or sounds can also be sent as a multimedia message. Furthermore, with the launch of MMS in April 2002, the limit of 160 characters per SMS was also removed. Less than a year later, Vodafone customers could even send short video clips. “With video MMS, images from mobile phones should ‘learn to work'”, Vodafone announced at Cebit 2003 – as we know, Cebit is a long story. However, the prerequisite for sending an MMS was an MMS-capable mobile phone.

reading advice: This technology was better

Vodafone cites the fact that MMS is hardly ever used as a reason for stopping. It was different before the appearance of modern messengers like Signal, Whatsapp or iMessage on iPhones. In December 2012, a record was reached with approximately 13 million MMS sent. Moreover, according to Vodafone, most MMS messages were still sent in December. Christmas and probably especially New Year’s Eve are probably the reasons why.

SMS (Short Message Service) is not affected by the MMS setting. You will therefore also be able to send SMS on the Vodafone network after January 17, 2023. The SMS service operates independently of the MMS service and will celebrate its 30th anniversary in December 2022. Compared to SMS, however, MMS remains a niche product, as shown also December 2012: at that time about 1.5 billion SMS sent.

This is how MMS works

Technically, an MMS is sent like an SMS via the mobile data network of the 2G, 4G or 5G network. A data plan is not required. An MMS image is first compressed on the mobile phone, then transmitted to the central multimedia message center and from there sent to the recipient. However, the maximum size of an MMS photo on all German networks was only 300 kilobytes, or 0.3 megabytes. Photos sent via MMS therefore arrive at the recipient with a lower resolution due to compression.