Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile Kill RCS Plans

Remember RCS — the cross-platform successor to SMS that (supposedly) had the support of all the U.S. carriers and Google? A supposedly modern messaging protocol that wasn’t going to support end-to-end encryption — and something that Apple never said a word about supporting.

Ron Amadeo, writing for Ars Technica:

The Rich Communication Services (RCS) rollout continues to be a hopeless disaster. A year and a half ago, the cellular carriers created the “Cross-Carrier Messaging Initiative (CCMI),” a joint venture between AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon that would roll out enhanced messaging to the masses in 2020. Now, Light Reading is reporting that initiative is dead, meaning that the carriers have accomplished basically nothing on the RCS front in the past 18 months.

Get me to the fainting couch.

★ Wednesday, 14 April 2021