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.
SMS
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.
Blocking unrecognized numbers forces an important question for both people and businesses – what about legitimate calls from people or businesses that I might want to hear from? Do I have to make sure that everyone that I might possibly want to hear from is in my contact list?
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.
Here we go again. This is the 12th consecutive edition of my mobile industry predictions, originally published in January of 2008. While we try to cover most major aspects of the mobile industry, we do tend to emphasize messaging-related topics as well as consumer engagement. But we also focus on key industry trends such as devices, mobile payments, and blockchain. If a trend begins to fall out of favor, then it may disappear from subsequent predictions. You can get a detailed review and accounting of my 2018 predictions here.
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.
Many of you, no doubt, have heard of the European Union’s European Banking Authority (or EBA) directive called PSD2 (Payment Services Directive). These guidelines were originally published at the end of 2015. By January 2018, all member states were required to implement the regulations.