en.Wedoany.com Reported - Germany Telekom (Deutsche Telekom), Telefónica Germany (Telefónica Deutschland), and 1&1 have announced that their MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) will be successively shut down between June 30 and July 1, 2026, marking the official end of a service once considered a milestone in mobile communication technology.
The MMS service was introduced to the mobile communications market in 2002, when the GSM network was the primary data transmission channel and UMTS had not yet launched. Users typically paid between 39 euro cents and 1.59 euros to send a message containing an image, with image quality limited by compression. Although once seen as an upgrade to SMS, the service failed to gain widespread user acceptance in terms of experience and pricing. Vodafone was the first major German operator to exit, shutting down its MMS service on January 17, 2023.
Technical data shows that MMS usage was far lower than SMS. Vodafone disclosed that at its peak in December 2012, approximately 13 million MMS messages were sent monthly on its network, compared to around 1.5 billion SMS messages during the same period. With the proliferation of smartphones, increased mobile internet bandwidth, and the rise of instant messaging apps (such as WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram), users gradually shifted to distributing images and videos via data traffic.
As an alternative to MMS, the aforementioned operators recommend users adopt the RCS (Rich Communication Services) service. RCS supports features such as images, videos, files, and group chats, but its implementation requires support from devices, operating systems, communication apps, and network infrastructure. Additionally, plans to fully shut down the GSM network are underway, with service expected to cease by 2028, rendering older phones that only support 2G networks completely unusable.
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