American telcos have sounded another death knell for RCS

AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile have pulled the plug on Cross Carrier Messaging Initiative (CCMI), the telcos’ joint initiative to develop an RCS-based cross-carrier rich messaging solution.

First reported by Light Reading, the operators behind the initiative decided to call it a day. “The owners of the Cross Carrier Messaging Initiative decided to end the joint venture effort. However, the owners remain committed to enhancing the messaging experience for customers including growing the availability of RCS,” Verizon said in a statement sent to Light Reading.

CCMI was announced in 2019 by the four national operators (including the then independent Sprint) to shore up the push for the adoption of Rich Communications Service (RCS) standard on all Android devices (Apple has never endorsed RCS). The project hired the technology company Synchronoss to develop the solution, though not much has been communicated about the goings-on since.

Meanwhile Google has launched its own RCS compliant messaging app for Android devices, simply called Messages, which T-Mobile has embraced. In practice this means the Google app has become the default bearer of messages including text messages for Android users on T-Mobile networks. This could not but be read as a sign that T-Mobile was throwing in the towel and defaulting to Google to provide the service. Today’s statements from Verizon (and an identical statement from AT&T) looks to be echoing the sense of resignation on the operators’ side.

RCS has been around for over a decade. It was developed based on IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem), promoted by GSMA, the industry organisation primarily representing the interest of telecom operators. Mobile operators became more enthusiastic when their hitherto lucrative SMS business was disrupted and destroyed by the so-called “OTT messaging services”, starting with BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) which was then joined by WhatsApp and the like.

While in terms of user features RCS has been playing catch-up to the WhatsApps and WeChats of the world, its key selling point of interoperability between operators is able to offer mobile operators an opportunity to not so much as competing in messaging as in offering other businesses a new channel to connect with consumers, the so-called A2P (“application to person”). According to Guilliaume Le Mener, Mavenir’s SVP for Enterprise Business, who spoke at the last Mobile World Congress in Barcelona (2019), RCS is still seen by consumers as a “clean channel”, not tarnished by the privacy scandals that have mired Facebook and co, or the over monetisation (read spamming) by others. Research shared by Mavenir showed 97% of SMS / RCS are opened by recipients within 3 minutes.

Despite its promise, RCS uptake has been lacklustre. Even in Japan, an outlier where Plus Message, an RCS-based cross-carrier messaging service, has won more users than anywhere else, (and Line, the country’s most popular “OTT messaging service” was having a bad day) its user base (20 million) is only a fraction of Japan’s mobile users. NTT DoCoMo alone has 80 million subscribers. Consumer enthusiasm for RCS and operator buy-in in any other markets has been much more muted, which has led analysts to repeatedly proclaim its demise.

Against such backdrop much hope of RCS is banked on CCMI. However, the owners’ decision to declare the end of the joint venture must be a heavy blow to the future of RCS, no matter how good a spin is attempted on it. Whether it would be a fatal one still remains to be seen.

GSMA declined to comment when approached by Telecoms.com.