Rich Communications Service (RCS) has received yet another blow, as an interoperability initiative announced in 2019 by the leading US carriers has been closed down.
The Cross Carrier Messaging Initiative (CCMI) was set up by AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint as a joint venture to develop an RCS-based messaging service that would be interoperable across all their networks. This was seen as a way to kickstart adoption of RCS, the GSMA-backed technology that was supposed to give operators a way to fight back against WhatsApp and other over-the-top messaging services with an alternative that supported many kinds of rich content. The US agreement was particularly focused on getting business support for a way to enable messaging to their consumers.
According to LightReading, the idea didn’t got very far. AT&T and Verizon provided identical statements when asked by the journal about the status of CCMI, saying: “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.”
One potential motivation for setting up CCMI was to reduce the power of Google in the RCS ecosystem. RCS, which has never achieved significant levels of adoption, was given a shot in the arm in 2016 when Google announced a universal profile for the technology within Android, as a way to weaken its own competitors, especially Facebook/WhatsApp. But now, T-Mobile is in full partnership with Google for its own messaging service, so probably does not feel the need of CCMI. Later this year, it will offer Google Messages pre-installed on all its Android devices (it has been offering RCS since 2015, and Sprint, which TMO acquired last year, was the seed user of the Google profile).
Synchronoss Technologies was the company providing the RCS platform for CCMI. It has seen the highest success with the technology in Japan, where it is a key part of Rakuten’s platform. But while it is natively supported on most Android devices and many featurephones, it is not supported by the iPhone, which accounts for about half the smartphone user base in the USA.
The biggest hope for RCS now lies with Japan and also with China, where in the past year or two the operators have pushed the technology as a defense against the power of Tencent.