Budapest, February 5, 2018 11:00

The experts of Telekom’s (then Matáv) mobile subsidiary, Westel, together with the engineers of Ericsson, were the first in the world to enable mobile subscribers to exchange photos as part of a commercial service. Since then the sharing of photos has become a global “epidemic”.

By now pictures and videos have become prevalent in the global mobile internet traffic: based on Ericsson’s Mobility Report from November last year, more than half of the 14 ExaByte traffic per month is visual content and this number may reach 75% by 2023 within the forecasted traffic of 110 ExaByte.

Although handsets equipped with cameras were rare at the turn of the century, in the autumn of 2002 the company was the first among the world’s operators that launched a fully-fledged commercial MMS service thus customers could send color photos and voice messages to each other - first in the world.

In the first version of MMS messages users could send pictures to another user’s mobile device and e-mail address. The first telephone, that could send both photos and videos was the Ericsson T68i, with a separate camera that could be attached to the device. These days one would smile at the capabilities of this handset, the same way as we would smile at the resolution of the T68i’s screen. However, back then it was state-of-the-art technology and the same applies to the mobile transmission “speed” of 100-200 kbps of the data exchange.

While SMS messages were sent via the traditional mobile network, MMS messages were exchanged through the mobile internet network.

MMS is still an existing service, however, with the spread of broadband mobile internet the sharing of photos and videos - including our most important self-expression tool, the selfie - has become much a simpler and functional exercise.