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AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile have finally agreed to replace SMS with a new RCS standard
All four major US carriers — AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint — have each issued the same joint press release announcing the formation of "a joint venture" called the "Cross-Carrier Messaging Initiative" (CCMI). It's designed to ensure that the carriers move forward together to replace SMS with a next-generation messaging standard — including a promise to launch a new texting app for Android phones that supports the standard by next year.
The Verge spoke with Doug Garland, general manager for the CCMI, to find out more about what this all means. RCS, if you don't know, is wickedly complicated on the backend from both a technical and (more importantly) a political perspective. But the CCMI's goal is to make all that go away for US consumers. Whether or not it can actually pull that off is more complicated.
First and foremost, CCMI intends to ship a new Android app next year that will likely be the new default messaging app for Android phones sold by those carriers. It will support all the usual RCS features like typing indicators, higher-resolution attachments, and better group chat. It should also be compatible with the global "Universal Profile" standard for RCS that has been adopted by other carriers around the world.
Garland says the CCMI will also work with other companies interested in RCS to make sure their clients are interoperable as well — notably Samsung and Google. That should mean that people who prefer Android Messages will be able to use that instead, but it sounds like there may be technical details to work out to make that happen.
Google is a fascinating and perhaps telling omission from the press release. Up until this point, the primary advocate for RCS has been Google, which bet on it as the only platform-level messaging service for Android. It was a bet that carriers haven't backed until now. Verizon isn't supporting RCS on the Pixel 4 after doing so on the Pixel 3, for example. Google recently stopped waiting for carriers in the UK and France and rolled out RCS support for Android phones using its own servers.
Google has been the world's biggest RCS advocate — and it was left out
[...] As for encryption, Garland wouldn't commit. He emphasizes that the CCMI intends to make sure that the chats are "private" and that the app it's making is "an experience [customers] can trust."
[...] There's reason for optimism but there's also reason to be worried. Carrier-made apps are notorious for being terrible, filled with ads and upsells. The CCMI says that "more details will be announced a later date." We'll be watching to see what the app situation will be, when exactly in 2020 it will launch, and whether Google (or even Apple) will have anything to say about it.
Rich Communication Services (RCS)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by MostCynical on Saturday October 26 2019, @04:38AM (9 children)
from my understanding, SMS is embedded in the tower handshake , and is, effectively, free (but they found a way to charge, anyway)
Now they want to separate messaging into a different 'standard' with more 'features' (because sending and receiving messages is so last decade) but with (inevitably) some other way to charge the user.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: -1, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday October 26 2019, @04:54AM (1 child)
They like that tower handshake, because they are faggots who like a lot of dicks. And I do mean a lotta dicks, like they're sucking tailpipes from old Chevies and shit. They're double-twisting those dicks with their two hands. Are those double-dick twisters the kind of people you trust with your technology, who have your Linkedin credentials? Are those the people you trust with your Twitter and Facebook accounts? If you believe that is the case, then your account will consist of double-dick twisting next to your smiling face.
Where oh where is the dignity in that? Dick-twisting, double-dick twisting motherfuckers. Also, Eithopian crackpipe smokers.
(Score: 2) by Subsentient on Saturday October 26 2019, @07:46PM
An exquisite troll. *does italian finger kissing gesture*
Delicious.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 26 2019, @05:08AM (2 children)
Your understanding is correct. This being a network protocol designed by phone companies, it is based on rigid time division multiplexing. That control packet in the tower handshake was going to transmit in its time slot, whether it had any useful data or not to send (because rigid time division multiplexing).
So sending an SMS during a timeslot where you would otherwise send a "nothing to send" message, is free.
That would be because by far too many people are completely ignorant of technology, and do not want to ever learn anything. So they willingly pay big bucks for something that cost the telephone carriers zero extra to provide, simply because they don't want to ever learn anything about their tech., which might enable them to understand they are being massively overcharged.
There's a reason why, back in the day of copper phone lines, I never paid for "touch tone" service from Ma Bell. I understood the tech., and understood that "touch tone" service was cheaper for Ma Bell to provide than pulse dial. So I refused to pay them for the privilege of something that was actually cheaper for them to provide. Then, eventually, one day, touch tone just magically started working, even without my ever having paid for it. Why? Because it really was cheaper for Ma Bell to provide than pulse dial handling, and they eventually just quietly turned it on because it did, as I knew all along, save them money.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 26 2019, @07:06AM
And yet, despite that 9-1 competitive advnatage you saw "back in the day" you didn't step up and do it at 8-1 margin?
(Score: 1) by RandomFactor on Saturday October 26 2019, @03:29PM
I remember making them remove it from my BBS line because I could care less if my system clicked or beeped when it dialed. Good times.
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Saturday October 26 2019, @12:50PM (1 child)
Dunno about GSM but for CDMA you are correct. Every few seconds the handset wakes up and asks the base station "got anything for me"? The base station sends back yay or nay. These messages only need a few bytes, but the smallest packet is 256 bytes. Hence the birth of SMS. They stuff the messages in these bytes that would otherwise be null. It actually costs the carriers more to track and bill these messages than it does to send/receive them.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 2) by Chocolate on Tuesday October 29 2019, @01:32PM
For years I paid 20c per SMS sent.
Bastards.
Later they "included" $10? of "free" messages in a plan. At 20c each.
Of course, most people I knew used their "free" allotment and then found out in their bill what the rest cost.
Bit-choco-coin anyone?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by richtopia on Saturday October 26 2019, @04:50PM (1 child)
I couldn't tell from the wikipedia article if this new tech depends on data or if it is embedded in the tower handshake like SMS. My critical consideration is reliability of communication. When towers get overwhelmed, data and voice become unreliable, but traditional SMS messages get through (maybe a minute or two late). Overwhelmed towers aren't often a major issue, but I have seen this in Ann Arbor during a football game and I've read about natural disasters also having situations where SMS is the only cell communication getting through.
(Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Saturday October 26 2019, @09:22PM
That actually happened to my father during the first round of 'high fire danger' blackouts here in California a few weeks ago — he went to make a call on (IIRC) the second day, and discovered that both his and my stepmother's phones had SMS plus "emergency calls only" status, but no data or regular calls.