Swisscom to discontinue MMS service
swisscom.ch
swisscom.ch
I personally never had any SMS/MMS contact with any person in the past two years since I've had my phone.
What people need to understand is that once Swisscom decides something, people are going to migrate. Swisscom disabled the 2G network at the start of 2021 and people which still had old "dumb" phones migrated either over to smart or feature phones, which both support messengers such as WhatsApp.
Swisscom realized this and is now getting rid of a feature that was practically unused, making their tech stack simpler. Totally understandable and most likely not a big loss for anyone except a few.
I use SMS, Signal and iMessage.
Have always wondered if ICQ should make a comeback, so good to see something like it exists.
> The most popular messenger app in Switzerland and worldwide is WhatsApp. However, we do not recommend WhatsApp or Telegram for security reasons (problematic encryption and non-transparent data protection guidelines).
But compared to MMS...
WhatsApp is starting to look like a TLA backdoor in comparison.
The revolution will be WhatsApped.
Your comparison doesn't make sense. MMS has no need for 0-days as it's a basic communication protocol that has zero security to begin with.
That's like saying "but how many 0-days does TCP-IP have?"
Is confidentiality of your messages the only thing you care about?
Even that you won't get to keep once hit by a WhatsApp vulnerability.
Meh, and once you get hit by a car, you will die. But what are the realistic odds of that happening?
You can also get hit by a an IOS or Android RCE 0-day, so you might as well give up using a smartphone if you feel the security risk is that high. Also, many of those RCE exploits used MMS for payload delivery, so your point of MMS shielding you from exploits is moot.
In the end, for most consumers, it's a matter of looking at the convenience to risk ratio, and MMS is neither very convenient nor terribly secure.
Well, most consumers do not accept the same argument for http vs https.
All I am saying is that replacing a simple and well tested system with a complex and barely evaluated system is bad for security.
And for the record, ALMOST ALL recent high profile hacks were related to WhatsApp.
1) Nobody is replacing MMS with WhatApp for you, you are free to use whatever alternative fits your needs best.
2) A system which almost nobody used because it was expensive to use in the beginning, insecure by today's standards, and doesn't serve the present day needs of consumers making it severely outdated, which is why phone users migrated in droves to alternatives like WhatsApp many years ago.
If carriers and the 3GPP consortium wanted to keep MMS relevant, then they should have updated it to support encryption and higher definition multi-media, and carriers shouldn't have charged through the nose for the service, but the SW industry disrupted the telecom industry with much higher quality messaging apps that were also free, which deprecated carriers to be just dumb data pipes and made SMS/MMS mostly obsolete.
>And for the record, ALMOST ALL recent high profile hacks were related to WhatsApp.
That's needlessly exaggerating without posting any sources for such grave claims. Which "recent high profile whatsapp hacks"?
And rightfully so. Apple supporting it won’t help the folks in Switzerland because Swisscom don’t support it. And why would they? They are clearly simplifying (cost saving) the stack. RCS is a poorly designed protocol with little to no carrier support outside of the US.
https://community.swisscom.ch/t5/Telephony-Knowledge-Base/RC...
At least with iMessage or Messenger we have a way of sending encrypted messages of almost any format. (Clarification: not necessarily E2EE but at least encrypted to a non-carrier company)
And they provide interoperability. If my aunt uses another carrier than me I can still reach her.
Of course carriers in the US are worse than elsewhere, so some people might have a stronger point like yours. I am in the lucky situation that e.g. SIM locking is illegal here.
At about half a megabyte of payload, it works very well to send photos, voice clips, even videos (10-15 seconds, or the quality degrades too much), also contact cards.
These days you have to actively resist Google upgrading you to their enhanced messenger app; once you have that picture messages will be sent using normal mobile data.
It is a little known legacy feature even here. I find that about 80% of random phones have it provisioned correctly; for the rest it can be manually done by fiddling with the APN settings but virtually nobody knows how to do that.
Doing so would be possible over vanilla SMS as well, I guess.
I took advantage of this back in the day (when I had a severely limited data plan and unlimited texting), by writing a script for my computer that would take a large file, split it into 1MB chunks, prepend a 1x1px PNG image to the chunks, and send them to my number through the email-to-MMS gateway sequentially. Then on my phone, I wrote a script that would remove the PNG headers and concatenate the chunks, giving me the original file.
My workflow consisted of SSH-ing into my PC from my phone, initiating a download, and then running the downloaded file through my scripts. By doing this, I could send up to 500MB per day to my phone without using any data.
I sometimes need to send these people photos of something.
I wonder if this is an issue of different parts of the world? I'm in USA, where my SMS/MMS traffic is unmetered and included in my phone plan unlimited. You?
Additionally, MMS is used for group text messages.
*update* 20 minutes after I posted this, I received an MMS message with a picture of a cat. So.
That being said, were it shut off I'd just use one of the other five messaging services on my phone...
I have a group of friends and we never were able to agree upon another chat protocol, so we have a group SMS chat that exchanges a a few hundred messages a week; it stared around COVID as we weren't getting together in person.
Anyone who wants to send a message where one of these is true must either use MMS, or convince everyone to sign up for some other messaging service if the people involved are not all either on an iPhone or Android:
- Includes a picture - Includes a contact - Longer than 160 characters - More than one recipient
Whatsapp is social media? I always thought it's a sms/mms that works...
(I also fail to understand how giving ownership to Facebook for all messaging is somehow an improvement in Europe.)
If you want to measure my certainty: I would bet 1000 Swiss Francs that if you went to the center of Zurich and asked 50 random people who have smartphones if they had one of WhatsApp/Signal/Telegram/Threema, they'd say yes.
There's a reason the blue / green iMessage bubbles are such a hot topic among the youths these days. It's not because everybody uses 3rd party messengers.
It's not a Google product.
It's in use by 55 carriers globally.
I can't find a source now, but I remember seeing statistics that support my claims (i.e. a sharp drop in P2P messaging, partially offset by B2C volume for 2FA etc).
Thankfully, it's not driven by Google, just "approved" by them. You don't want to use a Google technology for thinga you want to continue to exist 4 years from now.
The current situation means that people who are directly connected to Google's own Jibe infrastructure can message carrier-operated Jibe deployments. But they can't message third party RCS networks or vice-versa.
Pure speculation: Google got frustrated with carriers moving too slowly even after acquiring Jibe. I understand carriers not being compelled by Google's lack of vision for mobile messaging then. Especially given that Apple won't give a damn.
A few years pass and Google decides to pivot their messaging services once again, and that now is the time to push RCS for real. Google managed to convince big carriers on several continents that Jibe is the solution. And they probably think the small ones will eventually cave in.
This is only speculation, but it's Google. You don't get promoted for making an existing messenger work, or work better. Better to abandon it and join a team making a new messenger.
And even if there was: I really don't like the idea of an (at least somewhat) carrier-controlled messaging service. Especially the lack of multi-device messaging/not being able to access my account without my phone is really frustrating.
We had all of that with instant messengers in the early 2000s (proprietary or open/federated) – RCS seems like a big step back in that regard.
I was a MMSC developer over a decade ago, don't ask what most of the MMS traffic was.
Recent deals from Yallo mention throttling when roaming, but not in Switzerland where unlimited is really unlimited.
I have sunrise unlimited internet for 5 CHF/month (10 CHF without discount). Includes like 500 MB for roaming per month as well.
The formatting is messed up for me, so here's an third party alternative:
https://drfone.wondershare.com/whatsapp/how-to-stop-auto-dow...
I guess it does explain why people use apps like Telegram and WhatsApp while their usage is close to non-existent here.
As an aside, Unicode SMS messages fit far fewer characters per message (around 70 as opposed to 160), so most mobile devices still default to 7-bit ASCII unless the message can’t be represented as such.
For instance, SMS seems to be preferred for online selling platforms in which only a phone number is exchanged. It's strange to add a stranger to your contacts for a one-time transaction, so I've often been contacted by SMS or email.
It might also help that it's increasingly common to pay over the TWINT mobile payment system created by Swiss banks for which mobile numbers remain the primary identification method for private users, not to mention SMS messages used for transaction confirmations or login codes. Given the default option of a phone number for many of these private sales, an SMS is probably more straightforward than adding a new contact to use another app.
I accidentally configured Windows Phone to use ASCII instead of UTF-8 for SMS a while back then the first time I tried to send emoji the phone chucked a wobbly and told me it wouldn't send due to a character set error. Once that was fixed everything worked fine, and I don't get the indication I'm sending MMS.
iMessage is not really a thing, despite iOS substantial marketshare.
We should really be doing this another way, so yes, please kill MMS.
I used to use the MMS email gateway a decent bit as well. It made it really easy to get notifications for things before I got a Symbian phone with IMAP on it and could just use my regular email on the go. I still get some notifications through the MMS gateway from some services.
I still use MMS a decent bit. Its still the least common denominator between everyone I know for group messaging, and for the most part is a somewhat seamless experience between Android phones, iPhones, and non-smartphones. I do tend to do most of my messaging through an app, but probably 10% of my messages still go through SMS/MMS these days for those people who I don't have an overlapping app with, usually because they only use iMessage or they don't have a smartphone.
It's good to have a message service which has no ads, no charges, no signup, and no EULA. It's provided entirely by a regulated telecom regulator. No nonsense.
Also no sign up, no extra costs, handled by the carrier, needs a data plan though.
>Download the app from the App Store (iPhone) or Google Play Store (Android phone) and register as advised.
>Threema
>Signal
>TeleGuard
>The most popular messenger app in Switzerland and worldwide is WhatsApp. However, we do not recommend WhatsApp or Telegram for security reasons (problematic encryption and non-transparent data protection guidelines).
Well done, Swisscom!
Will my SMS be sent into multiple chunks? Will my system tell me it's over the character limit?
Yes. Actually, it already is. MMS is rarely used now for text-only messages, and instead concatenated messages is the norm. It does require network and OS support on both ends, however.
At least with MMS it all just works
Looking at their Privacy Policy[1], they make a suspiciously claim to not log anything. Not even payment information (whatever that means). Which makes me wonder how they combat fraud, spam and fake accounts. And, ultimately, the product being closed-source I guess you will just have to trust their claims.. just like WhatsApp and Telegram that Swisscom advises against for that same reason.[2]
[1] https://teleguard.com/en/privacy
[2] Actually, some parts of Telegram’s code is open source. Although it’s only the clients so the point about trust stands.
HN hates WhatsApp but it was disruption with a giant fucking D visible from Mars.