At the beginning of 2019, we were in an extended government shutdown, but that blip is now ancient history. Since then, so much has happened – much of it good, but some of it not so good. 5G became a commercial reality; IoT flourished, but both also managed to disappoint in some areas. In our messaging world, rich communication services (RCS) gained ground, but mobile operators lagged, despite many actions from Google. Still, gains were made in all of these key areas.
Category Archive: RCS
RCS misinformation needs to stop. Many of the authors of these news stories just don’t know what they are talking about and totally blow the RCS announcements out of proportion. Let’s get some perspective on these and maybe try to help everyone align.
In Part 1 of this series, we focused on trends to mitigate robocalls in voice communications and began to look into efforts to cut down on unwanted text messages. In Part 2, we examined alphanumeric and long-code sender IDs in text messaging. Part 3 looks at next-generation trends and recommendations.
In Part 1 of this series, we focused on trends to mitigate robocalls in voice communications and began to look into efforts to cut down on unwanted text messages. Here, we’ll examine sender IDs in text messaging.
For the most part, we are able to identify, with a high level of credibility, the source of an incoming text or call. But over the past few years, our communications devices – whether landline or mobile, voice, or text – are under attack by robocalls. This is especially true in the voice world. It’s gotten so bad that legitimate businesses are suffering because people don’t answer their phone calls anymore.
Normally, each year in the dead of winter, I publish a predictions article about the coming year. Earlier this year, we published my 12th consecutive predictions for the mobile industry. However, today, I would like to dust off the crystal ball and push it a little bit further into the future to look at how the messaging industry might evolve over the coming five to 10 years.
First, we as a messaging industry need mobile operator support for Universal Profile 2.0 – and quickly. In 2018, we had strong messaging provider and aggregator support for RCS, but only a smattering of operators launched support for UP 2.0. The GSMA notes that around 75 mobile operators have launched RCS, but the vast majority of these are UP 1.0 support only. Remember, this time around it is the enterprise/brand (A2P) RCS that is driving this new SMS replacement. It is supported by all the top messaging providers that manage over 80% of the world’s A2P (or B2C if you want) SMS messaging. These are the companies that have the enterprises, banking/financial, travel industries, logistics, social/entertainment, consumer brands, and more that are already using messaging.
In the mobile industry, 2018 certainly did not disappoint in terms of trending activity. The T-Mobile acquisition of Sprint (still pending as of this writing), 5G, IoT, rich communications services (RCS), and network neutrality were dominant themes throughout the year.
Just over a year ago, I was an RCS (rich communications service) skeptic. A big one! Meaning: I thought that the RCS standards were too fragmented, a waste of time, and too little, too late; that they wouldn’t make an impact on enterprise/brand messaging, among other thoughts. Certainly, the RCS opportunity has been lost for person-to-person messaging, with the overtaking of SMS by various messaging chat apps such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat, Snapchat, and others. However, since Mobile World Congress 2017, I have started to believe that there may be, at last, hope for RCS – especially as a primary channel for conversational messaging for brands and enterprises.
Mobile World Congress (MWC) is the record-breaking annual get-together of over 108,000 attendees in Barcelona, Spain, interested in mobile, 5G, connected cars, devices, augmented reality, virtual reality, cloud computing, IoT, and much, much more. As I do most years, I attended (I believe this might have been my ninth). MWC is the most important event for the mobile-focused industry. This year, the theme was “Mobile: The Next Element.” The idea of this theme was to “reflect the elemental role of mobile in the lives of billions of people around the world.” While I was quite busy with over 15 meetings and discussions in our massive (and popular) SAP stand, I was able to walk around occasionally during the 4 days to try to get a better understanding of this year’s major themes.
Mobility, Messaging, and More 