Since partners don’t wholesale bill each other for MMS service using the Bill-and-Keep approach, how does a visited network collect revenue?
While there is no wholesale billing for the MMS service itself, wholesale billing may still occur for the underlying data bandwidth used to transport MMS in a visited network. When roamers send or receive MMS messages in a visited network, data bandwidth and radio resources in that network are used to facilitate MMS messaging between the user and their home MMSC. From the visited network perspective, this is simply a data session between the roaming user and a server in their home network (in this case, the server happens to be the user’s home MMSC). Therefore, as with any other packet data session for an inbound roamer, the visited network will wholesale bill the home network for bandwidth used during the session.
