martinlittle.com:thinkThin

From Mobitopia:

Orange announced on Friday that it has signed interconnect agreements with the other UK networks, allowing MMS to be sent to and received from users on those networks.
It seems strange that it has taken so long to get this kind of agreement in place, and yet, (as far as I can tell) Orange are the first and only network to have full interconnectivity. I'm sure there are technical challenges involved, but the potential revenue generation must be pretty decent given the astronomical cost of an MMS message. The flipside to that argument is that maybe so few MMS messages are being sent that the cost of setting up the interconnect agreements (technically and business-wise) outweighs the potential revenue generation.

Somewhat ironically, given the huge advertising push Vodafone are putting into the Vodafone Live! service which has MMS at its core, Vodafone users were unable to send or receive MMS messages from any other network until this agreement with Orange.

As I was doing my fact checking for this, I had a look over the various network Web sites. None of the sites I saw mentioned to which networks 'true' MMS was available, or what happens when you send to someone on a network where no agreement is in place. Another case of mobile companies not quite telling the truth, that is going to lead to disgruntled customers.

I have assumed above that users will use the default network gateway for sending MMS, much in the same way as SMS. I accept that third party services such as Now MMS exist, but I think I'll pass on receiving any more "advertising messages" via phone than I already do.