As U.S. carriers are turning up interoperability between their multimedia messaging service, or MMS, networks, independent wireless carriers are quickly joining in. U.S. Cellular, Leap Wireless and Dobson Communications have already signed interoperability agreements with Tier 1 partners, and many industry experts expect that most of the Tier 2 and Tier 3 providers with MMS services will be interoperable with all of the top five by the end of this year.

With the immense popularity that short messaging service (SMS) enjoyed after interoperability was enabled in 2002, independents aren't waiting around for the big boys to get their agreements worked out before making their own inter-carrier connections. Leap and U.S. Cellular have already started negotiating intercarrier agreements with Verizon Wireless, but all of them are looking toward interoperability hub providers to give them connectivity to the rest of the country's — if not the world's — other MMS providers.

Leap and U.S. Cellular have selected Mobile 365 as their interop hub, and Dobson is going through VeriSign. In the coming months, most of the Tier 2 and Tier 3 carriers probably will select one of those two vendors to give them a one-stop link to the entire North American MMS footprint.

Currently, many of the largest operators are choosing to interconnect using the same hubs (Cingular and Verizon Wireless are handling their inter-carrier messaging through Mobile 365), but many of those larger carriers eventually may chose to establish direct links to each other. While the hub providers make interoperability a heck of lot easier, they also wind up becoming revenue partners. Two huge carriers exchanging millions of MMS messages every month may choose to leave out the middleman and establish a direct connection between their MMS centers (MMSCs).

Creating those links, however, is easier said then done. Despite the supposed standardization across MMS platforms, every vendor's MMSC is slightly different. Interoperability isn't the plug-and-play cakewalk many vendors would like you to believe. Not only do the different MMSCs process individual MMS transactions differently, they all transcode the multimedia in different ways.

Transcoding essentially takes a multimedia payload formatted for one type of phone and one type of network connection and turns it into a format the recipient phone can display. While individual carriers and their MMSC vendors have worked out the transcoding issues for the 10 or so MMS-capable phones on their networks, interoperability means opening up the transcoding Pandora's Box for 100s of different handsets spread across numerous carriers' disparate networks.

That's why the hub and spoke model is so appealing to the independent operators. Even if it wanted to directly connect with its larger peers, the Tier 1s may not devote the time and resources to solve transcoding and interoperability hassles with carriers that ultimately account for only a small percentage of their overall MMS traffic. Meanwhile the independents and rural operators often don't have the overall traffic on their networks to justify the same cost on their end.

In many ways, though, MMS interoperability could be a significant windfall for smaller wireless providers. While the big carriers have been the primary drivers of MMS, MMS interoperability benefits the small carriers equally even if they don't commit the marketing muscle and resources to promoting. By definition, MMS is a mobile-to-mobile technology, and as with SMS, MMS traffic is unlikely to stay confined within its network of origin once interoperability is enabled.

If independent operators can get their networks ready, they could find themselves handed a lucrative data service without even trying.

Contact me at kfitchard@primeidabusiness.com