Mixed messages What is happening with RCS?

Interesting times lie ahead for the messaging sector, with the very tech underpinning it changing – from SMS to RCS and OTT – while even those that carry it, the MNOs, potentially facing disruption from new entrants from outer space – well, low Earth orbit. Paul Skeldon reports

As UK operators VMO2 and Three UK start to offer RCS for business messaging, research reveals that globally growth of RCS deployment and indeed its uptake has proved slow. The power of OTT continues to undermine RCS use by businesses, while pricing, lack of communication and integration between MNOs and the risk of fraud are all hurdles to its uptake. Find out what operators need to do – before satellite messaging services come and do it for them.

So, what does this mean for telemedia? Messaging is a key plank in how telemedia can drive traffic. While back in the day PSMS was used as a billing tool (it still is, but the role of messaging has changed), today messaging services are more about marketing and driving traffic, as well as being part of a business-to-consumer customer service and engagement offering. While SMS can and does do all this, the pandemic showed both businesses and consumers that they could do and get so much more with messaging.

OTT services such as WhatsApp – and more deeply exemplified by WeChat in China – readily filled the gap left when consumers could no longer interact face-toface with businesses when Covid struck. These services rapidly adapted and evolved to show just what could be done with rich messaging and created not only the rich business messaging (RBM) market, but also pushed messaging into being an ad medium and traffic generator – it even brought together the worlds of messaging, marketing and payments as the beginnings of transactional rich media messaging have started to emerge.

While Google has plugged away for more than a decade to get its RCS modality accepted as the de facto SMS 2.0 rich messaging platform, it wasn’t until Apple finally embraced it in its iOS18 update at the end of 2024 that RCS looked like it might actually go somewhere.

MNOS DRAGGING FEET

Only it isn’t. Not so far at least. Operators it seems didn’t stand poised to explode RCS offerings on to the market as soon as Apple gave its approval.

Instead, they have largely failed to move forward with working together on interoperability to make sure everyone can send and receive RCS across all the various OSs available. They have also been inconsistent in pricing it and, while it is something of an unknown, there is little they have said about prevent fraud through RCS –which let’s face it is bound to happen as soon as enough people use it; scammers love a new channel.

All this reluctance could be down to RCS being unproven – largely because it is as, with only half of users able to use it until November 2024, no one has, err, used it. But operators need it. With SMS revenues shrinking and with OTT services currently the best game in town for businesses looking for rich business messaging, RCS is the only messaging offering that MNOs will soon be able to leverage.

While seeing UK operators come together to start the roll out is encouraging, globally this is more anomalous. There needs to be much deeper engagement with RCS by both consumers and operators, the latter being the only way that the former will ever see RCS. I myself have yet to receive on. No one I know outside of work even knows what it is.

IS AI THE AI-NSWER?

With AI creating a whole new level of chatbots – not least ones that text like real people – there is more to gain here than just adding a new way to text. Businesses can offer rich messaging, some of it even transactional, but creating engaging, realistic and personal conversations with it (using AI chatbots) is next level – and something that operators have the chance to get into on the ground floor.

Telefonica Labs seems to working towards this with its AI Chatbot tech, but so too are many other tech companies. As the adult industry has shown, there is already a massive market for AI generated personalised text chat; if you can create that as a customer service model with rich, interactive formats then everything from customer service to advertising changes radically.

Couple all this with the fact that satellite messaging – through constellations such as Starlink – are starting to become a reality (especially in developing and un/ under-connected regions) and the messaging market looks very exciting to consumers and tech bros, but really rather bleak for slow to move operators.