The MTNSMS.com website is still available and sending short messages, but only to MTN subscribers in South Africa.
The largest website in Africa, and what MTN claims is the biggest SMS website in the world, can no longer be used by the largest part of its around seven million registered users, most of whom are based in Europe.
Blocking international messages is a sad necessity driven by economics, says Sam Michel, one of the founders of the site. Michel holds the title "chief of E" at Airborn, the MTN incubator responsible for MTNSMS.
"What is amazing is the relationships we helped build all around the world, that we were able to unify the planet," he says. "A lot of the messages we got said things like 'it is a sad day, but thanks for the experience`, which makes us feel that we achieved a little bit during the time it worked."
M-Cell, parent company of both MTN and Airborn carried the costs of the free service and says international connections was simply too expensive. "MTNSMS.com now has to pay Telkom approximately 9c for the SS7 signalling link on each message sent internationally," M-Cell commercial director Irene Charnley says in a statement. Assuming that all messages over the service were sent internationally, as most were, MTNSMS was costing the company around R8 million a month, with little advertising revenue to offset the cost.
Michel says he is saddened that a global landmark originated in SA has to be closed down, but that there is no alternative to the Telkom link and no way to sustain it. He says interconnect fees demanded by other operators did not play a major role in the closure decision, as reported earlier by ITWeb.
The future: corporate
"The interconnect issue was a factor but not a major factor. It has been going on for years. The operators that wanted interconnect would disconnect us, but the customers would demand that they switch us back on."
M-Cell expects to make an announcement in April detailing the future of the site and the technology behind it, which is in use by America Online in its ICQ messaging software.
"We will now take MTNSMS.com to its next level of development by using its tried and tested technology to create a bigger and better revenue-generating service," Charnley says.
Michel says Airborn is developing a number of services for the corporate market based on the two-way cellphone-to-Internet system developed for MTNSMS, among them a desktop interface to the website which allows both individual and bulk messaging.
But the grand "proof of concept" experiment, which saw a massive community develop with only word-of-mouth marketing, is over.
"The Internet is evolving from free to fee and we have reached a point where we have to follow suit," says Charnley.
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