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Comment by dools | Hacker News Reader

I run a phone business in Australia which is, as far as I'm aware, the only product that supports voice, txt and picture messaging on a virtual number outside of North America.

Ever since I built the product, people have been telling me SMS is obsolete and RCS is coming (4 years now). Google bought Jibe Mobile in 2015, if you go to the Jibe website and try to submit their "Get Started" form there is an error.

I have tried to get in touch with carriers to find out how to connect up RCS from my product (because hey, don't want to get behind the 8 ball) and haven't found any way to get it set up, even when asking my upstream providers.

I really don't think RCS is going anywhere, but if it is, it would be good to be able to build it into my product!

[0] http://www.benkophone.com/

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IIRC with RCS, carriers don't run the infrastructure, Google does.

That’s not how it’s supposed to work. It’s a federated system with each carrier supposed to run things for their customers.

Why does it work today? After years of begging Google gave up and put all their users without carrier support (basically everyone) onto a Google RCS instance.

Despite how the article tries to portray things in many ways it’s iMessage but worse. With Google running everything it might as well be proprietary. And it lacks full E2E encryption.

Things probably would’ve been better off if Google had just stuck to their own private protocol and used that instead, perhaps opening it.

Telstra kicked off RCS in Australia, but only on their network, then Google did one for everyone else, but it doesn't work with Telstra AFACT.

Vodafone has this business RCS page:

https://www.vodafone.com/business/carrier-services/messaging...

and they "launched" in 2018, but from what I can tell still no-one is using it.

There's a lot of confusion around it.

> from what I can tell still no-one is using it.

> There's a lot of confusion around it.

The story of every feature introduced by telcos in the last 100 years that goes beyond voice calls or text messages.

It's not just on the telcos, Android fragmentation as a whole makes implementing new network features an uphill battle. VoLTE is an absolute mess (on Android) if your build doesn't have settings for your carrier. Google doesn't sell the Pixel in my country, so the only way to enable VoLTE here is to root your device. This is only going to get worse with carriers sunsetting 3G networks - anyone roaming on a Pixel in such a country won't be able to make calls, even to emergency numbers.

I seem to recall a similar picture when SMS was introduced. For many years, you couldn't text people outside your phone network.

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