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MMS is the Mulitmedia messages service available on all modern phones phones. It is advertised as adding rich media such as images, videos, audio to an SMS message. However these messages are not just bigger SMS messages and use a combination of SMS and Data Service (Internet) to send and receive the message. As such both the sender and receiver must have Data Services available to use MMS. As with SMS, MMS is a store and forward technology and the message once sent, will be available for collection by the receiver when they next connect to the network.
The sending and receiving of an MS message is controlled by a MMSC (Multimedia messaging Service Centre). This works in an analogous method to the SMSC works with SMS messages. The message is sent to the MMSC, stored, the recipients MMSC notified that an MMS awaits, and theis then notifies the recipient which then downloads the message.
It is clear that to send / receive an MMS message a Wap Push SMS message plus a a data transfer is required. Most (UK) MNO will charge the sender 55p to send an MMS. This is despite the sender having already paid for unlimited SMS messages and 4G data.
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