Third-party content providers are becoming increasingly savvy in hiding wireless transactions from the network operators that deliver them, industry insiders say.
A handful of direct-to-consumer content providers in the United States and abroad are disguising their wares on mobile networks as photo messages and other “packages” in an effort to conceal transactions from carriers. The move allows third-party Web portals to circumvent garden walls, cut operators out of revenue shares and-potentially-to deliver pornography and other content carriers may not want on their networks.
Such deceptive methods are not entirely new, according to Diarmuid Mallon, product manager of application and content services for LogicaCMG plc. But the increasing number of platforms for delivering content is creating headaches for operators looking to fully control activity on their networks.
“This is something that has been going on in certain markets for a number of years now,” said Mallon. “It was [disguised] SMS (short message service) originally, and now they are sneaking through ringtones” and other content.
The issue is a growing problem in some European and South American markets where the wireless content market is thriving, Mallon said. Carriers sometimes are doing the heavy lifting for content providers, blindly delivering big data packages without getting a piece of the transaction outside of airtime charges.
“It’s increasing traffic on the network,” Mallon said of the disguised content. “You’ve got a message being billed as a simple message, but in fact there’s a ringtone buried in there.”
3GUpload.com, an Indiana-based content provider, is said to package some of its content as a multimedia messaging service delivery to reach subscribers of Verizon Wireless, which is well known for its tightly controlled walled garden. The vendor, which offers its wares directly to consumers from its Web site, accepts only credit cards and money orders directly from customers and eschews the traditional carrier-billed model in an effort to further circumvent network operators.
3GUpload declined to discuss specifics of its content delivery methods during an interview with RCR Wireless News in June.
In the United States, where wireless content is in its infancy, carriers are reporting fewer problems than some of their counterparts in other markets. In fact, the subject appears to be at once highly controversial and relatively obscure.
Several messaging providers and Tier 1 carriers opted not to discuss the topic with RCR Wireless News, while other companies claimed to be completely unfamiliar with the practice of content providers disguising their wares.
Mobile 365, which powers MMS interoperability for major carriers in the United States and Asia, has experienced no trouble with content providers deceptively packaging their offerings, according to William Dudley, the company’s senior director of product management.
“We’ve not heard anything” about the issue, Dudley said. However, he explained, there are several potential methods a vendor could use to try to avoid detection. Content providers could use a bank of handsets to send content via a server, mimicking peer-to-peer MMS transmission.
Or a vendor could change a file’s Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension (MIME) type, the suffix used to denote a certain kind of file like jpg, tiff or midi. While incorrectly marked files sometimes fly through wireless networks, such inaccuracies are usually caused by technological glitches, not nefarious content providers, according to Dudley.
“Those are typically problems with some handsets that may have trouble with certain types of media,” he said of inaccurately flagged wireless files. “We correct that. … It’s not been a very prevalent problem.”
But some messaging providers and content aggregators said some carriers are already struggling to identify and eradicate disguised content.
“It’s definitely a trend we’ve seen, and carriers are aware of this as well. … It’s a problem,” said Chris Chuang, vice president of strategic development at Motricity, which aggregates, manages and delivers content. “It’s driving carriers to go with a trusted partner like Motricity who can manage the content.”
And that trend is likely to continue, some say, as more consumers use third-party Web sites and short codes to access content instead of shopping exclusively through carrier decks.
“There’s clearly a requirement on the network side (to control third-party content),” said LogicaCMG Business Development Director Chris Newton-Smith. “You really need to have a whole service infrastructure (in place) in order to be able to police this stuff.”
