Rich Communications Services (RCS) is a technology that refuses to die. Conceived by the GSMA as way for operators to fend off the challenge from over-the-top messaging services like WhatsApp and Skype, it has failed to attract significant support for its enhanced voice and messaging platform, but has had repeated revivals.
Its main hope currently rests with China, where in the past year the operators have pushed the technology as a defense against the power of Tencent; and with Rakuten’s support for RCS in Japan.
However, another source of hope, the US operators’ Cross-Carrier Messaging Initiative (CCMI), seems to have stalled. Announced in October 2019 by AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and messaging specialist Synchronoss, it was designed to support interoperable services and a broad ecosystem across the USA. But an investigation by SDxCentral turned up no positive results. AT&T and T-Mobile said there were no updates on the project, while a Verizon spokesperson said the carriers was “actively working on the development, integration, and testing of the cross-carrier RCS platform,” but provided no details.
CCMI seemed to be an attempt to make RCS less dependent on Google, which gave the platform a boost in 2016 when it announced a universal profile within Android. The CCMI implementation supports all the features of the RCS standard, handling of high resolution photos and attachments. The benefit for operators was that it would be more tightly integrated with their network and core than the Google version, which is cloud-based. This should have restored much of the original appeal of RCS – that it is tied to the mobile network, unlike an OTT app, and so usage can be monitored and monetized by the MNO, and integrated with its back office systems and its other apps.