AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile have finally agreed to replace SMS with a new RCS standard
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All four major US carriers – AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint — have each issued the same press release announcing that they are forming “a joint venture” called the “Cross-Carrier Messaging Initiative” (CCMI). It is designed to ensure that they 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 it in 2020.
I spoke on the phone 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…
