RCS messaging: still a zombie, but now wearing a suit

This post originally appeared on October 4 on my LinkedIn feed, which is now my main platform for both short posts and longer-form articles. It can be found here, along with the comment stream. Please follow / connect to me on LinkedIn, to receive regular updates (about 1-3 / week)

Yesterday I followed the Mobile Ecosystem Forum stream of its #RCSWorld conference, on #RCS #messaging, especially business messages. I thought it was time to get an update.
 
As regular followers know, I’m a long-time critic of RCS. I saw it announced in 2008, wrote reports & advised telco clients about its many problems in 2010-2013, called it a zombie tech in 2015 (“28 quarters later”) and have been sniping at it ever since, including at Google’s acquisition of Jibe and its attempt to turn it into Android’s equivalent of Apple #iMessage.
 
Some flaws have been addressed (it finally uses E2E encryption), while Google’s tightening control of its features has maybe fixed its “design by committee” paralysis and historic fragmentation. Google is now hosting the whole application for many MNOs, rather than telcos relying on (and paying for) in-network IMS integration, but with an implicit threat of end-running them if they don’t support the services to customers.

There's about 1.2bn phones with RCS active - mostly Google #Android but also about 200m in China. This has been driven by its adoption as the default messaging client on new phones, rather than by consumer download.

I didn't hear any stats on genuine active use - ie beyond just using it as a pseudo-#SMS/MMS app because it's the default. Numbers always seem to be monthly MAUs rather than meaningful DAUs. No anecdotes of teenagers who swapped from FB / WA / iMessage / WeChat / TikTok / whatever because RCS is cooler with better emojis, birthday greeting fireworks or cat-ear image filters.
 
To be fair, the conference name was misleading. Almost the entire event was about RCS Business Messaging (RBM) rather than personal or group messaging. It was about targeted marketing campaigns (that’s spam to most of us), customer interaction with so-called “brands”, multichannel whatnot, and blather about engagement and “digital” marketing

Apparently A2P revenues for SMS are flattening, but the addition of "rich" interactive in-messaging customer experience functions will reignite growth. One operator in the audience asked why the same forecasts have been shown (and not come true) for the past 4-5 years. Apparently it's too complex for most developers.

So the big innovation is "basic RCS" with 160 characters. SMS with a brand logo, a verification tick and read receipts. It's aiming at the #cPaaS market to get more devs/marketers onto the first rung & hope to catalyse more fancy use-cases later.
 
IMO this is why Apple isn’t going to support it anytime soon, despite Google's cringey social media exhortations. The notion RCS is a standard for P2P messaging is a smokescreen. It’s an ad & CRM platform, not an SMS replacement or default way to chat with friends. It’s not going to be the messaging equivalent of USB-C chargers & forced on Apple by the European Commission
 
In a nutshell, it’s still a zombie. But now it’s a zombie in a suit spamming you with ads and "engagement" while it eats your brain

 

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New: Future of Video & RTC Workshop Series, starting May 19th

 "Why do people make phone calls?"

... the opening question at my old Future of Voice workshops. 

 It stumped many attendees and also many of my telco consulting clients during private engagements.

Most just looked blank, or perhaps suggested "to speak to people?". To be fair, the answer isn't obvious. Which is rather odd, given the need or desire for phone calls is the basis for the entire industry.

Few people think broadly about "purpose" of communications. What is the participant trying to achieve? How does the service or application help them do that? How can it be improved? What are the real sources of value?

In reality, there are 100s of uses for phone calls: To get information. Catch up with a friend. Buy something. Complain. Get help. All deserve a different, optimised experience. Yet a phone call is basically a one-size-fits-all, common denominator product. 

Telco's don't do "voice". They just do "telephony" - a single 140-year old, clunky, unnatural, heavily-regulated voice applications

Instead, they should have considered the 1000s of types of voice communication that are NOT phone calls. Audio chat, push-to-talk, karaoke, voice assistants and so on. All designed for particular purposes, with user-interaction models and technology stacks. Some dependent on the network, some on apps, some on devices, some in learned human behaviour.

The same is happening now for video. It's more than just video conferencing.

It's training, collaboration, security, education, medicine, machine vision, infra-red, social broadcast or 1000s of other uses, applications & business models.

There are platforms, enablers & APIs. Developer tools & design & test capabilities. WebRTC is important but not alone.

If telcos, service-providers, cloud/platform players, developers, enterprises and investors really want to understand the value and timelines for future communications - they need to ask the real questions. Not get blinded by ancient standards, or regulatory mandates to measure things in "minutes".

RTC (realtime communications) is getting more complicated, diverse - and has huge opportunities, as well as risks to incumbent providers of old/poor products. We all know which are the good/bad WFH conferencing products, or messaging services these days. 

What does the future bring? New models for UCaaS & cPaaS? Innovative video services for the smart home? New audio drop-in chat apps? AR/VR conferencing? What are the impacts of 5G, edge-computing and AI?

So I'm announcing: 

A new 3-part / 2-timezone "Future of Video & RTC" workshop series with WebRTC maven Tsahi Levent-Levi from May 19th. Early-bird rates end soon.

 

Sign up here.

 

Voice: So much more than Phone Calls

 [Originally published on LinkedIn. Please subscribe to my new LinkedIn Newsletter here]

Trivia Question: When was the first example of network-based music streaming launched?

I'll bet many of you guessed that it was Spotify in 2006, or Pandora in 2000. Maybe some of you guessed RealAudio, back in 1995.

But the actual answer is over a century earlier. It was the Théâtrophone, first demonstrated in 1881 in Paris, with commercial services around Europe from 1890. It allowed people to listen to concerts or operas with a telephone handset, from another location across town. It even supported stereo audio, using a headset. It finally went out of business in the 1930s, killed by radio. Although by then, another form of remote audio streaming - Muzak, delivering cabled background music for shops and elevators - was also popular.

Why is this important? Because these services used "remote sound" (from the Greek tele+phonos) over networks. They were voice/audio communications services.

Yet they were not "phone calls".

Over the last century, we've started to use the words "voice communications", "telephony" and "phone calls" interchangeably, especially in the telecoms industry. But they're actually different. We often talk about "voice" services being a core component of today's fixed and mobile operators' service portfolios.

But actually, most telcos just do phone calls, not voice in general. One specific service, out of a voice universe of hundreds or thousands of possibilities. And a clunky, awkward service at that - one designed 100+ years ago for fixed networks, or 30+ years ago for mobile networks.

*Phone rings, interrupting me*

"Hello?"

"Oh, is that Dean Bubley?"

"Yes, that's me"

"Hi, I'm from Company X. How are you today?"

"I'm fine, thanks. How can I help you?"

... and so on.

It's unnatural, interruptive and often unwanted. A few years ago a 20-something told me some words of wisdom "The only people who phone me are my parents, or people I don't want to talk to". He's pretty much right. Lots of people hate unsolicited calls, especially from withheld numbers. They'll leave their phones on silent. (They also hate voicemails even more).

I used to go into meetings at operators and ask them "Why do people make phone calls? Give me the top 10 reasons". I'd usually get "to speak to someone" as an answer. Or maybe a split between B2B and B2C. But never a list of actual reasons - "calling a doctor", "chatting to a relative", "politely speaking to an acquaintance but wishing they'd get to the point".

Now don't get me wrong - ad-hoc, unscheduled phone calls can still be very useful. Person A calling Person B for X minutes is not entirely obsolete. It's been good to speak to friends and relative during lockdown, or a doctor, or a bank or prospective client. There's a lot of interactions where we don't have an app to coordinate timings, or an email address to schedule a Zoom call.

But overall, the phone call is declining in utility and popularity. It's an undifferentiated, lowest-common denominator form of communications, with some serious downsides. Yet it's viewed as ubiquitous and somehow "official". Why do web forms always insist on a number, when you never want to receive a call from that organisation?

Partly this relates to history and regulation - governments impose universal service obligations, release numbering, collect stats & make regulations about minutes (volume or price), determine interconnect and wholesale rates and so on. In turn, that has driven revenues for quite a lot of the telecom industry - and defined pricing plans.

But it's a poor product. There are no fine-grained controls - perhaps turning up the background noise-cancellation for a call from a busy street, and turning it down on a beach so a friend can hear the waves crashing on the shore. There's no easy one-click "report as spam" button. I can't give cold-callers a score for relevance, or see their "interruption reputation" stats. I can't thread phone calls into a conversation. Yes, there's some wizardry that can be done with cPaaS (comms platforms-as-a-service) but that takes us beyond telephony and the realm of the operators.

Beyond that, there's a whole wider universe of non-call voice (and audio) applications that operators don't even consider, or perhaps only a few. For instance:

• Easy audioconferencing
• Push-to-talk
• Voice-to-text transcription (for consumers)
• Voice analytics (e.g. for behavioural cues)
• Voice collaboration
• Voice assistants (like Alexa)
• Audio streaming
• Podcasts
• Karaoke
• One-way voice / one-way video (eg for a doorbell)
• Telecare and remote intercom functions for elderly people
• Telemedicine with sensor integration (eg ultrasound)
• IoT integrations (from elevator alarms to smartwatches)
• "Whisper mode" or "Barge-in" for 3-person calls
• Stereo
• De-accenting
• Voice biometric security
• Data-over-sound
• In-game voice with 3D-positioning
• Veterinary applications - who says voices need to be human?

There are dozens, maybe hundreds of possibilities. Some could be blended with a "call" model, while others have completely different user-interaction models. Certain of these functions are implemented in contact-centre and enterprise UCaaS systems, but others don't really fit well with the call/session metaphor of voice.

I've talked about contextual communications in the past, especially with WebRTC as an enabling technology, which allows voice/video elements to be integrated into apps and browser pages. I've also written before about the IoT integration opportunities - something which is only now starting to pick up (Disclosure: I'm currently working with specialist platform provider iotcomms.io to describe "people to process" and event-triggered communications).

But what irritates me is that the mainstream telecoms industry has just totally abdicated its role as a provider and innovator of voice services and applications. You only have to look at the mobile industry currently talking about Vo5G ("5G Voice") as a supposed evolution from the VoLTE system used with 4G. It's basically the same thing - phone calls - that we've had for over 100 years on fixed networks, and 30 years on mobile. It's still focused on IMS as a platform, dedicated QoS metrics, roaming, interconnection and so on. But it's still exactly the same boring, clunky, obsolescent model of "calls".

There was a golden opportunity to rethink everything for 5G and say "Hey, what *is* this voice thing in the 2020s? What do people actually want to use voice communications *for*? What interaction models and use-cases? What would make it broader & more general-purpose?" In fact, I said exactly the same thing around 10 years ago, when VoLTE was being dreamed up.

Nothing's changed, except better codecs (although HD voice was around on 3G) and lame attempts to integrate it with the even-worse ViLTE video and perennially-useless RCS messaging functions. The focus is on interoperability, not utility. Interop & interconnection is a nice-to-have for communications. Users need to actually like the thing first.

Some of the vendors pay lip-service to device integration and IoT. But unless you can tune the underlying user interface, codecs, acoustic parameters, audio processing, numbering/identity and 100 other variables in some sort of cPaaS, it's useless.

I don't want a phone call on a smartwatch - I want an ad-hoc voice-chat with a friend to ask what beer he wants when I'm at the bar. I want tap-to-record-and-upload of conversations, from my sunglasses, when someone's trying to sell me something & I suspect they're scamming me. I want realtime audio-effects like an audio Instagram filter that make me sound like I'm a cartoon character, or 007. (I don't want karaoke, but I imagine millions do)

So remember: the telecoms industry doesn't do "voice". It just does one or two voice applications. VoLTE is actually ToLTE. It's not too late - but telcos and their suppliers need to take a much broader view of voice than just interoperable PSTN-type phone calls. Maybe start with Théâtrophone 2.0?

This post was first published via my LinkedIn Newsletter - see here + also the comment stream on LI

#voice #telecoms #volte #phone #telephony #IMS #VoLTE #telcos #cPaaS #conferencing

If you're interested in revisiting your voice strategy, get in touch via email or LinkedIn, to discuss projects, workshops and speaking engagements. We can even discuss it by phone, if you insist.

How will voice be delivered on private 4G / 5G & CBRS networks? Private VoLTE?

An area I've seen little discussion about is the intersection of new private 4G / 5G networks, with voice and unified communications, UC. Most debate is about either local IoT (i.e. data) connectivity, or neutral-host / wholesale approaches for in-building or rural coverage.

But where enterprises deploy "pure" private networks aimed at employees or visitors, they are likely to want voice / telephony capabilities, plus more advanced communications capabilities. While this is already done for highly-specialised local cellular deployments for mines, military or maritime, it is much less clear how this could scale to more general enterprise users. 

Many of the existing local-cellular users are also just based on 2G/3G, for which simple circuit-switched infrastructure has been available for years (I had a client supplying softswitches for private voice with pico-cells, as early as 2006).

My view is that UCaaS, cPaaS, cloud telephony, IP-PBX & collaboration solution providers should be looking much more closely at the impact of CBRS, and its international equivalents, providing localised 4G/5G wireless in new spectrum, and neutral-host models. 

It is unclear whether enterprises will want to deploy "private IMS" solutions, cloud-based VoLTE & SMS, or use some simpler forms of wireless-capable VoIP in their own domain. There are various deployment scenarios I can see, each of which will require careful thought & focused strategies: 

• Transition from two-way radio (eg TETRA) to cellular push to talk
• Integration of existing UC/UCaaS/PBX with private cellular voice
• IoT integration of realtime voice/video (for example "speak to an engineer" functions)
• Fit with conferencing, collaboration & messaging platforms
• Interoperability / roaming scenarios with public PSTN & mobile calling
• cPaaS scenarios & APIs tailored for private mobile networks
• Will private 5G networks using slicing techniques to prioritise QoS for non-3GPP VoIP?
• For neutral hosts, how will they enable roaming telephony / messaging / other voice & video applications
• What happens with numbering & identity?
• Can private cellular work for contact centres?
• Are there "IMS lite" options for enterprise, that cuts down some of the features and integration seen in telcos?
• Is this a prime candidate for multi-tenant "VoLTE-as-a-service" cloud propositions?

I'm going to be watching this whole area more closely in coming months, as it seems to be rather overlooked, at least publicly. Given that a number of companies in the UCaaS / cPaaS space also have footholds in CBRS or mobile core networks (eg Amazon, Google, Twilio) it wouldn't surprise me if there's a lot going on beneath the surface here too....

(Please contact me if you're interested in exploring this domain, have existing solutions, or would like to engage me on private advisory work)  

#5G, #cloudcommunications, #neutralhost, #UCaaS, #cPaaS, #voice, #collaboration

Update: Telecom & Network Cryptocurrencies, Tokens & ICOs

Introduction

Back in August I wrote a post on blockchain-based ICOs and tokens/coins for the telecoms space (link). Quite a lot has happened since then - including a huge boom in Bitcoin and "AltCoin" valuations and public awareness - so I thought an update was useful. 

In a nutshell - there's a growing number of telecom/networking "coins" available, with a wide variety of concepts, team backgrounds and business models. Some are very interesting, but some others are... let's say, "ambitious".  And a few look like utter nonsense, seemingly lacking understanding of the relevant technology or marketplace dynamics. It's possible there's a couple of outright scams as well.

I'm not making recommendations, or giving warnings, about specific tokens here. But in the spirit of "caveat emptor", I also give a list of cautions and possible problems, that investors should think about, or ask the various currencies' teams. Telecoms is a lot more complex than many people think - especially  the "behind the scenes" bits of technology.

 
Note: If you've found this post via an ICO/cryptocurrency site, an introduction: I'm primarily a mobile and telecoms analyst. I advise on technology and business-model trends for networks and communications, eg 5G, IoT systems, Wi-Fi, voice & video & UC, regulatory policy, the future role of carriers/CSPs, and the impact of "futures" innovations like AI / ML, blockchains (public & private), quantum computing and drones on telecoms. Most of my clients are telcos or network equipment/software vendors. I'm not a fintech, crypto or blockchain generalist - I look at blockchains & tokens where they intersect with the telecom world. Please get in touch if you are interested in my research & advisory work, or if you are looking for a keynote speaker or moderator.


What's been happening with telecom cryptocurrencies?

I'm not going to repeat my previous posts on ICOs, tokens and the wider telecom blockchain space. You can read blog posts here and here, or download a full white paper I wrote for Juniper Networks, here and listen to an associated webinar here.

The second half of 2017 saw continued emphasis on private blockchain use-cases for telecoms and networks, although despite a few high-ish profile initiatives and press releases, there's not much in the "real world" yet besides pilots. I've been doing some interesting consulting work in this area, though - 2018 should throw up a lot more news.

But there has been far more noise - albeit often superficial - about public blockchain and token technologies. Few major telcos have (publicly) announced involvement, but there's growing attention from the type of smaller, competitive types of service provider. Think tier 2/3 MVNOs, travel-SIM providers, VoIP companies, messenger & mobile advertising providers and so on, rather than big carriers. [Telenor is working with a content-oriented token provider - link]

Obviously, that fits against a wider background of interest and investment in cryptocurrencies. Whether we're witnessing the birth of a new financial/transactional system, or a possible bubble, I'll leave for others to debate. To me, it looks a bit like 1995 - lots of innovative web companies, but also a lot of ridiculous concepts, with valuations to match. Which are the Amazons of the future - or the Altavistas, or the pets.com's - I'll leave to others to work out.

There has also been a corresponding rise in regulatory concern, and growing focus on so-called "utility tokens", where in theory a given coin isn't just a store of value or a payment mechanism, but has some underlying property that makes it of broader use to consumers or businesses. Typically this means that some other capability can be "tokenised" - which could be anything from property to an artist's work, and used within that business activity. 

Incidentally - one interesting comms-related trend that's appeared recently is the use of Telegram* (and some other group-messaging apps) as a mobile-friendly and anonymous/encrypted discussion & announcement forum for cryptocurrency teams. Many of the tokens use Telegram as an addition to public (often spam-infested) chat on Twitter, and private internal Slack channels, plus assorted blogging and forum tools. I haven't seen any with an RCS messenger link, obviously.

*EDIT: Telegram has just announced its *own* ICO plans, literally hours after I posted this. Details here (link)


What telecoms/networking tokens are available?

A growing number of tokens relate to things which look "telecoms-like" - whether that's data connectivity provided via cellular or WiFi, SMS or instant-messenger functions, voice-call minutes, SIM identities or something else similar. 

Some are trying to resell existing users' quotas or attention or connectivity, while others are trying to build new hardware platforms. Some are trying to create meshes or secure peer-to-peer connectivity, while others are looking to be wholesale marketplaces for service providers to offer smart-contracts to consumers (or other SPs).

(There's also another huge set of tokens for IoT-related functions and applications, but I'll consider those another time). 

Note: I'm using token, coin, cryptocurrency, altcoin etc interchangeably. Various people will assert differences vigorously, but it's not something that is relevant here.

Note 2: This is being written on 7th January 2018, so dates / funding & issuance status are accurate as of today, but obviously changing at a rapid pace.

Note 3: I am NOT making any recommendations by mentions here. Various ICOs and tokens have been of questionable quality, valuations are volatile & sometimes ridiculous, and some are rumoured to be outright scams. Be extremely careful.

Note 4: I've probably missed some out. Get in touch if you want to tell me about your telecom/network coin, or give me a detailed briefing on the ones below.

• Airfox, Airtoken $AIR (link): Attempts to draw a link between mobile prepay credits, advertising, user-data and potentially micro-loans in future. It extends the current model of gifting or sending "recharges" to many international mobile operators' prepay customers, by shifting from normal payments to a cryptocurrency bought in a marketplace or earned by viewing ads. 
• Althea (link): Aiming to build a network of WiFi and other wireless networks, underpinned by cryptocurrency micropayments and incentives. Recently decided against an ICO, in favour of being "cryptocurrency neutral" - see blog here
• Ammbr [DISCLOSURE: I am an advisor], Ammbr, $AMR (link). Private investor funded, but tokens being listed on exchanges soon. Developing a hardware mesh networking system [Wi-Fi & other technologies], linked to blockchain-based micropayment and self-sovereign identity platform. Aiming first at locations with "unconnected" or poorly-connected communities, but with broader applicability.
• Birdchain, $BIRD (link): Pre-ICO. Developing a messaging app & platform for users to re-sell their SMS allocation for application-to-person messaging 
• Blocknum, $GIGA token (link) Token sale currently occuring. Looking at using the telephone network (PSTN), SIP signalling [used for VoIP] and phone numbers as a basis for a new blockchain for transactions.
• Bubbletone, Universal Mobile Token, $UMT (link). Currently doing pre-sale before ICO. Intending to be a marketplace for MNOs/MVNOs to publish data-plans or content services as smart contracts, with the plans/identities pushed down to users via multi-IMSI SIM cards, or as eSIM profiles. Aims to remove premiums for roaming. 
• Crypvisr, $CVN (link): ICO in 2017, listing on exchanges due soon. Encrypted messaging/communications platform, aimed at both consumers and enterprises.
• DENT Wireless Dent-coin, $DNT (link). Platform for mobile data plan & allowance purchase and sale. Aiming to remove roaming fees. Early app version is live.
• EncryptoTel, $ETT (link): Token-based enterprise "cloud PBX" communications system. 
• Mobilink, Mobi-Coins $MOBI (link). Upcoming ICO. Attempting to create an ad-funded mobile voice and data service, with a custom SIM card and network of MNO/MVNO relationships.  
• Mysterium, $MYST, (link) Decentralised VPN aiming to allow people to share unused network capacity, and use encryption to reduce the risk of intrusive data analytics of Internet usage by ISPs. It's a bit similar to Tor, but more flexible
• Qlink, $QLC (link): Token sale ongoing. Platform for sharing & micropayments for a variety of telco "assets", starting with WiFi access & then aiming for cellular data, SMS and content. Also planning own access points, including LTE-U unlicenced cellular.
• Rightmesh, $MESH (link): Upcoming ICO. Creating an incentivised device-to-device mesh (WiFi, Bluetooth etc). The company operating it (called Left.io) also offers another device-to-device communications/sharing app called Yo.
• Smartmesh, $SMT (link) Tokenised device-to-device mesh based on WiFi, Bluetooth LE etc., starting with smartphones connecting via an incentivised peer-to-peer mechanism.
• SMSChain, $SMSTO, (link): Creating a decentralised SMS gateway for application-to-person text messages. Incentivises users to donate their unused SMS quotas, via a mobile app. Cancelled proposed ICO (link) & may list tokens on exchanges at later date.
• Telcoin, $TEL, (link): Payment/money-transmission token intended to be distributed through existing mobile operators, and aggregators.
• Telegram, Grams: [Added as this emerged shortly after I published this - see link] The messenger app is considering a huge ICO and token sale, which could allow it to embrace payments and money-transfer, and perhaps other applications to become a cryptocurrency-enriched competitor to WeChat and FB Messenger.

What could possibly go wrong? A lot.

A lot of my work as an analyst and consultant involves "stress-testing" ideas and business-plans. Many concepts sound interesting, but face challenges of practicality - whether that's technical, commercial, legal or other. Reading through a lot of the tokens' documentation, or speaking to project teams, I see a lot of aspirations that are going to bang heads against reality.

Some problems can be fixed with time, or clever developers. Others are going to be intractable, and will need workarounds, or completely different strategies.

In this post, I'm not offering opinions or reviews of individual tokens, although I have private opinions on a number of them. A lot of what I read could be best described as "aspirational" - and in some cases, there are many layers of complexity or problems ahead, and I anticipate pivots and revised expectations, as practical issues come to light. Some that I've seen look completely naive or muddle-headed (or even, whisper it, fraudulent).

Some of the issues that could derail the various tokens' opportunity and prospects include:

• Most existing telecom plans (fixed and mobile) have terms and conditions that prohibit resale of "unused capacity" - and are likely to be updated with new token-proof T's & C's if risks are seen.
• Most MVNOs will also have a range of limitations in their contracts, from their host MNOs.
• Security - everything new comes with its own novel risks, even if the blockchain itself is secure. For instance, would you fancy having your 2FA password codes sent via SMS, that transits some random person's phone and app?
• Nobody likes paying for stuff (even micropayments) if it's also available for free via a different path. That means that there will be a lot of arbitrage - for example, it's hard to compete against free WiFi, or against the newer "roam like home" packages.
• Nobody likes paying for stuff in a "currency" that changes in value compared to normal money. I don't want to use some sort of converter to know how many pennies it'll cost for a phone call or Wi-Fi connection.
• There's all sorts of regulatory horribleness around telcos, at national, regional and global levels. Trying to assert "it's all decentralised, we don't need to follow the rules" won't work if it involves licensed spectrum, or messing with legal rules on registering network users' identities, lawful intercept etc.
• Running anything blockchain-related on a smartphone uses power & battery - especially if it needs to keep radio connections active as well. Power-management is always a challenge.
• Traditional telecom networks have complex operational and billing software. While some is too-inflexible and very expensive, most is a necessary evil to deal with performance management, customer service, creating innovative plans, deal with inter-party revenue-sharing and so on. In a decentralised world, how do you query charges, or call when something fails? How can you watch for problems emerging? (And who watches?)
• The hard part of getting data connections working is often "backhaul", linking a base station or WiFi access point to the main Internet, especially from remote areas. It's quite hard to tokenise digging up roads to install fibres.
• Slow deployment of eSIM-capable devices & back-end infrastructure, and willingness of carriers to offer remotely-provisioned "profiles" to third parties.
• Private cellular networks (even in unlicensed / shared spectrum) need core-network software and numerous other "moving parts". Deploying LTE-U isn't like buying a Wi-Fi access point from a store & setting it up.
• A lot of existing consumer Wi-Fi access points are provided by cable operators & broadband telcos, and integrated with a modem/router. Most people won't want to replace them, or daisy-chain a second device, or re-flash the hardware. Business Wi-Fi systems are usually locked-down by IT departments.
• Anything using a mobile app for control, mining, transaction or advertising is at the whim of Apple's AppStore rules, and to a lesser degree Google's. They also need to deal with updates to features in new versions of iOS and Android, which may break things, or compete with them.
• All of the various parallel schemes will need to inter-work with each other at some point, if they're successful.
• Adding extra latency because of extra network hops (or worse, payment negotiations) is going to be a lousy user-experience. 
• The Internet and telecoms are very bi-directional. Do packets (or SMSs or calls) in both directions get charged the same amounts?
• Advertising-funded mobile connectivity has been tried multiple times, and has multiple problems. In particular, you can't insert ads into most apps, and use of encryption/privacy tools like VPNs mean that cookies in mobile browsers may not work properly forever.

There's probably another 20-100 similar "gotchas" out there, applying to some or all of the token concepts. Part of my work is trying to predict these types of problem before they arise, and have an idea of how tractable they are, and what workaround might exist. If you're an innovator in this space, or an investor, and want someone to cast a critical eye over a project, get in touch. (information AT disruptive-analysis DOT com, or on LinkedIn)

Ironically one area that's almost certainly overestimated as a problem is anything to do with Net Neutrality, though. I've covered various examples of such nonsense in prior posts, such as this one (link).

It should be noted that many of these tokens are thinly-traded, or even unlisted on any major cryptocurrency exchanges. Some are pre-ICO / private-funding. Please note that I offer no recommendations on investing in anything, especially cryptocurrencies. Do your own research and use extreme caution if you're tempted. 


Summary

The tokenisation of telecoms and networks is evolving rapidly. It's genuinely fascinating, as are the potential uses of private/permissioned blockchains inside telcos. However, anyone expecting decentralisation to change the networking world in 2018 (or 2019) is going to be disappointed. 

There's lots of enthusiasm, but many roadblocks in the way. Many of the concepts are likely to prove unworkable - and while some projects may raise enough funds through ICOs or private investors to allow them to pivot, others will likely fail. If you're speculating in the short term, that might not matter. But be aware that harsh realities will come along with the new opportunities.

Please get in touch if you'd like to get deeper analysis, or if you're looking for advisory input as a project team or investor (although I'm not able to give investment recommendations).   

Sources of value in voice: Asking the right questions

In the last few weeks I've been doing a lot of work on voice communications (and messaging / video / context):

• I attended Enterprise Connect in Orlando discussing collaboration, UCaaS, cPaaS, WebRTC and related themes
• I spoke at a private workshop, for a Tier-1 operator group's communications-service internal experts team
• I've helped a client advise a strategy around the new European eCall in-vehicle emergency-call standard
• I've been writing a report on VoLTE adoption and impact, for my Future of the Network research stream published by STL Partners / Telco 2.0 (Subscribe! Link here)

A common, over-arching, theme is starting to form for me. The future sources of value in voice are all about SPs / vendors asking the right questions when they design new services and solutions.

Historically, most value in voice communications has come from telephony (Sidenote: voice is 1000 applications/functions. Phone calls are merely one of these). And in particular, the revenue has stemmed from answering the following:

• Who is calling?
• Where are they?
• Who is being called?
• Where are they?
• How long did they speak for?
• Plus (sometimes):
• When did they call?
• What networks were they on?
• Was the call high-quality? (drops, glitches etc)
• Is it an emergency?

This pretty much covers most permutations for ordinary phone calls: on-net/off-net, roaming, international and long-distance, fixed-to-mobile and so forth. 

Clearly, the answers to these questions are worth a lot of money: many billions of dollars. But equally clearly, they don't seem to be enough to protect the industry from competition and substitution from other voice-comms providers, or alternative ways of conducting conversations and transactions. As a result, voice telephony services are (mostly) being bundled as flat-rate offers into data-led bundles for consumers, or perhaps per-month/per-seat fees for unified comms (or SIP trunks) for business. 

In other words, current voice revenues are being delivered based on answering fewer questions than in the past. Unsurprisingly, this is not helping to defend the voice business.

The current "mainstream" telecoms industry seems to be focused only on adding a few more questions to the voice roster:

• Is it VoIP / VoLTE / VoWiFi? (Answer = sometimes, but "so what" for the customer?)
• Can we use it to drag through RCS? (Answer = No)
• How can we reduce the costs of implementation? (Answer = maybe NFV/cloud)
• Are there special versions for emergencies? (Answer = yes, eg MCPTT and eCall)
• Is there a role for CSPs in business UCaaS? (Answer = yes, but it's hard to differentiate against Microsoft, Cisco, RingCentral, Vonage and 100 others)
• What do we do about Amazon Echo? (Answer = "Errrrmmmm... chatbots?")

Given the huge expense and complexity involved in implementing IMS for VoLTE, many mobile operators have very little "bandwidth" left to think about genuine voice innovation, especially given wider emphasis on NFV. What limited resources are left may get squandered on RCS or "video-calling". 

Fixed and cable operators are in a slightly better position - they have long had hybrid business models partnering with PBX/UC vendors for businesses and can monetise various solutions, especially where they bundle with enterprise connectivity. For fixed home telephony, most operators have long viewed basic calls as a commodity, and are either protected by regulators via line-rental and emergency-call requirements, or can outsource provision to third parties.

In my view, there are many other questions that can be asked and answered - and that is where the value lies for the future of voice communications. None are easy to achieve, but then they wouldn't be valuable if they were:

• Why is the call occurring? (To buy something, ask a question, catch up with a friend, arrange a meeting or 100 other underlying purposes)
• Where is the call being made and received (physically)? For instance indoors, in a noisy bar, on a beach with crashing waves, in a car, in a location with eavesdroppers?
• Is the communication embedded in an app, website or business process? 
• Is the call part of an ongoing (multi-occasion) conversation or relationship?
• Is a "call" the right format, with interruptive ringing and no pre-announcement? Is a push-to-talk, one-way, "whisper mode", broadcast, team or other form more appropriate?
• Are both/all parties human, or is a machine involved as well?
• What device(s) are being used? (eg headset, car, wearable, TV, Echo, whiteboard?)
• Who gets to record the call, and own/delete/transcribe the recording?
• Are the call records secure, and can they be tampered with?
• What's the most effective style of the call? (Business-like, genial, brusque, get-to-the-point-quickly etc)
• What languages and accents are being spoken? Can these be adjusted for better understanding? What about background noise - is that helpful or hindering?
• Can the call add/drop other parties? Are these pre-arranged, or can they be suggested by the system in context?
• Are the participants displaying emotion? (Happiness, anger, eagerness, impatience, boredom etc) . How can this be measured, and if necessary, managed?
• Is there a role for ultrasound and/or data-over-sound signalling before or during the call?
• How can the call be better scheduled / postponed / rescheduled?
• Is a normal phone number the best "identifier"? What about a different number, or a social / enterprise / gaming / secure identity?
• Are there multiple networks involved/available for connection, or just one? What happens when there are multiple choices of access or transit providers? What happens where the last 10m is over WiFi or Bluetooth beyond the SP's visibility?
• Is encryption needed? Whose?
• What solutions are needed to meet the needs of specific vertical-markets or other user groups? (Banking, healthcare, hospitality, gaming etc)
• What are the desired/undesired psychological effects of the communications event? How can the user interface and experience by improved?
• Did the call meet the underlying objectives of all parties? How could a similar call be improved the next time?
• How do we track, monetise and bill any of this?

In my view it is these - and many other - questions that determines the real value of voice communications. Codec choice and network QoS are certainly useful, as is (sometimes) interoperability. Network coverage is clearly paramount for mobile communications. But these should not be put on a pedestal, above all the other ways in which value can be derived from something seemingly simple - people speaking to each other.

I'm seeing various answers to some of these questions - for example, contact-centre solutions seem to be most advanced on some of the emotional analysis, language-detection and other aspects. There are some interesting human-driven psychology considerations being built into new codec designs like EVS (eg uncomfortable silences between words). MVNOs and cPaaS players are doing cool things to "program" telephony for different applications and devices. The notion of "hypervoice" was a good start, but hasn't had the traction it deserved (link). Machine-learning is being applied to help answer some of these questions - most obviously with Alexa/Siri/Assistant voice products, but also behind the scenes in some UC and contact-centre applications.

But we still lack any consistent recognition that voice is "more than calls". 99% of effort still seems to go on "person A calls person B for X minutes". Very little is being done around intention and purpose - ask a CSP "Why do people make phone calls?" and most can't give a list of the top-10 uses for a "minute". Most people still use "voice" and "telephony" synonymously - a sure-fire indicator they don't understand the depth of possibility here. And we still get hung up on replacing voice with video (they have a Venn overlap, but most uses are still voice-centric or video-centric).

Until both the telco and traditional enterprise solutions marketplaces expand their views of voice (and entrench that vision among employees, vendors and partners), we should continue to expect Internet- and IoT-based innovators to accelerate past the humble, 140yr-old phone call. Start asking the right questions, and look for ways to provide answers.

SaaS & UCaaS - aiming for Enterprise Eyeballs

I'm at Enterprise Connect in Orlando this week, talking to people about trends in business communications, notably UC, conferencing, cPaaS and contact centres. I'm curious to see the current real-world adoption of WebRTC, shifts around enterprise mobility/wireless, integration with VoLTE, and adjacent technologies such as SD-WAN, machine-learning and IoT integration.

One unexpected thing has become clear from Day 1: the enterprise market is following the consumer web insofar as every vendor and service provider wants to maximise share of users' attention, or "eyeballs".

While in the consumer world, this is all about advertising and data - spending hours on Facebook translates to more chances to see ads, as with TV - in the business world it's a bit different. 

Because software has license fees or XaaS subscription revenues, all the vendors want to create "platforms" in which customers' employees "spend their day", at least when they're in front of a PC or mobile device. More time potentially equates for higher per-seat fees, plus more chance for selling extra modules of software.

So a UC or UCaaS provider wants to be the hub for calls, chat, conferencing, collaboration, "enterprise social", customer interation, productivity and so forth. Cisco, Broadsoft, RingCentral, even Amazon with its new Chime app, all have pretensions to being where you spend hours a day "doing work". 

An office suite provider like Microsoft wants the same thing - you should be sending emails and doing presentations, and communicating from there. One speaker today described workers having different "jumping-off points" for setting up meetings or collaborating. One employee might have a Salesforce interaction as a trigger, others could be inside Slack or Outlook or a call-centre front-end (or various vertical-specific applications).

Obviously many jobs only have a few minutes a day in front of a screen or on a phone, but others (knowledge workers) involve hours. There's probably a big-data and machine-learning play emerging here as well, where increased eyeball-minutes can yield insights into worker productivity and process efficiency. Arguably Google scores extra points here too, if you're logged in and using Chrome for some of your work.

As far as I know there's no business-world equivalent of TV viewing-habits or web-browsing statistics. But there's certainly a rush for different vendors and XaaS providers to drive up their ratings. I expect we'll see a much broader focus on "enterprise eyeballs" through 2017 and beyond.

EDIT: A good point from a commenter on my LinkedIn, that other players here are workflow & ERP providers. A lot of people will "live" primarily in SAP, Oracle etc during their day - those could also be the hub for UC and collaboration as well. Also, for the consumer space, ComScore have just published research (link) on how people spend their "digital minutes" (ugh, horrible expression) - a business-user version would be fascinating.

Telcos & OEMS: You should ignore the GSMA's "Advanced Messaging", RCS & "Universal Profile"

Summary: There are  10+ reasons why RCS messaging has failed, despite a decade of trying. Even with Google's involvement, the GSMA's "Universal Profile" and "Advanced Messaging" only fix, at most, two of these problems - and introduce new ones. Despite the hype, mobile operators should continue to deploy VoLTE only when it is really needed, and should avoid Advanced Messaging, RCS and ViLTE entirely. There are many other better ways for telcos to retain relevance in communications apps & services.



What's happening? 

In the next couple of weeks, we will likely be hearing a lot about the GSMA’s “Universal Profile” (UP), developed with Google as a standardised setup for new Android devices to support VoLTE, plus the latest version of the decade-old failed RCS messaging "zombie" service, now being rebranded as “Advanced Messaging”.

UP also incorporates a version of ViLTE, the video-calling application that can’t even be called a zombie, as it was never alive in the first place. Essentially, UP is a combination of VoLTE and RCS6.0. The first spec was published in Nov 16 (link). (Microsoft is also apparently supporting it, although seems less deeply involved than Google).

Expect the MWC announcements to talk breathlessly about how this is going to enable “Messaging as a Platform” (MaaP), and there will likely be some dubious-seeming big numbers mentioned. Any claims of "XXXmillion active users" should be *very* carefully questioned and analysed - what actually counts as use? There will be a lot of spin, painting what is essentially legacy SMS usage with a new app, as RCS. Daily is much more relevant than monthly data here.

Most probably, you’ll hear lots of hype and PR noise about “mobile operators winning back against the OTTs”, or “people won’t need to download apps”, or “everyone is fed up of having 17 messaging apps”. You’ll hear that it can use network—based QoS, which is great for VoLTE primary-telephony calls, but irrelevant otherwise. Vendors will probably say “well you’ve got an IMS for VoLTE so you should sweat the assets and add extra applications”.

We might even get an announcement about “advanced calling”, which is a way to improve phone calls with pre/mid/post-call capabilities (not actually a bad idea if done well) but force-fitted to use RCS rather than a more pragmatic and flexible approach (which is a very bad idea, and likely executed very poorly).

So ignore it. There are no customers, no use-cases, and no revenues associated with “advanced messaging”. It’s the same pointless RCS zombie-tech I’ve been accurately predicting would fail for the last decade. It’s still dead, still shambling around and still trying to eat your brain. It’s managed to bite Google and Samsung, and they’ll probably try to infect you as well.

What's the background?

If you're new here: I've been following and talking negatively about RCS for 9 years now. The project started in 2007, and emerged as a lukewarm 2008 IM concept for featurephones (link) in the days when both iOS and Facebook where just emerging onto the stage. I described it as a "coalition of the losers" in a report in 2010 (link) It evolved to a dead-on-arrival branded app called "joyn" as smartphones gained traction (link), and it has tried climbing out of its grave so many times since that I describe it as a zombie (link). Various operators have deployed it, then given up - even in markets like Spain and South Korea where multiple operators offered it at first.

I'm currently writing a report on VoLTE trends and implications for my STL/Telco 2.0 Future of the Network research stream (link). It should be out in the next month or so. As part of my research, I've been updating myself about the GSMA's plans to blend VoLTE with RCS - hence becoming aware of the Universal Profile and Advanced Messaging developments. 

Most people I speak to in the mobile industry privately admit that it's been a huge white elephant. I've met people who've been given the "poison chalice" of RCS inside operators and eventually quit their jobs in desperation. Huge slugs of time and money have been spent on a no-hope service, that could have been better deployed elsewhere, on things that could make a real difference. 

It's been pushed by:

• A few operators misunderstanding the nature of user behaviour, requirements and preferences for communications services, thinking that there had to be a standardised and interoperable "magic bullet" to compete with WhatsApp, Facebook, iMessage and WeChat (and 100's of others).
• The desperation of network vendors trying to make IMS seem relevant for something other than plain-old phone-call VoIP, either for fixed broadband voice, or VoLTE.
• The GSMA's stubborn belief that it needs to predefine interoperability and lengthy specifications, rather than iterate on something basic that people actually like. Also, the belief that it has to tie in the phone number / any-to-any model.
• Google, wanting to find a way to compete in the messaging space it has repeatedly failed with, especially creating an Android version of iMessage based on the Jibe acquisition. Samsung has recently joined in with its own acquisition of Newnet.

So my "coalition of the losers" joke (er... jibe?) in fact has a reasonable basis in history. And history doesn't record many such coalitions having great success at anything, except maybe keeping a few people occupied.

A couple of operators have launched recently - Rogers and Sprint in North America - but the other operators are still delaying, and have big iPhone populations anyway.
 
In the meantime, while the telecom industry has procrastinated over RCS, various other adjacent players such as Twilio and Nexmo (now Vonage) have pushed the supposedly "dead" SMS market to become the standard mechanism for A2P messaging, and signed up thousands of developers for that, plus voice/video/notification cPaaS capabilities. In the time it has taken RCS to get to its 10th anniversary, we have seen Apple, Facebook, Whatsapp, WeChat and others create huge value and loyalty.


But, but... Google!
 

It’s a little difficult to tell if Google actually believes in RCS, or whether it’s just cynically using the GSMA and gullible MNOs to push Android harder – and especially, help reduce the horrendous fragmentation of its platform in terms of both OEM-specific skews and non-updated older OS variants.

As I wrote previously (link), it also seems likely that Google is using the surprisingly-pliant cellular industry to help it create its own version of Apple’s iMessage. The optional hosted RCS Hub could also be an early foray by Google into the NFV and cloud communications space – perhaps with an eye to ultimately competing not just with the Huawei/Ericsson/Nokia axis, but also maybe Amazon and Twilio over time. That’s quite an extrapolation on my part, though - not based on anything public from Mountain View.

What’s definitely clear is that Google doesn’t see RCS as “the one messaging platform to rule them all”, nor the Universal Profile as a way to replace all other forms of voice and video communications. It has a broad range of other services, including Duo, Allo, Voice, HangOuts (now being reoriented towards enterprise), WebRTC support in Chrome and perhaps natively in Android at some point. It also has a stake in Symphony (messaging/UC for finance and other verticals), and works with most of the larger UCaaS and hosted PBX/UC players.

It also wouldn’t be a surprise if Google acquires other cool youth-oriented messaging apps to compete with Facebook’s Instagram, although a post-IPO Snap might be too pricey. And of course, it has its own push-notification platform which is probably (quietly) the world’s biggest messaging service that nobody talks about.

In other words, Google seems OK about creating a lowest-common denominator function that's no worse than what it has already, but which brings extra cooperation brownie-points from the mobile industry, and a bit more leverage with its wayward licensees. Its downside is limited - and if miraculously it somehow it can create a MaaP platform, its upside significant. There's probably also some interesting data-analytics and machine-learning gains in here somewhere too - even if it's just a better understanding of what Android users don't like.

In other words, from Google's point of view, it's a worthwhile and almost risk-free punt. Whether the mobile industry wants to over-rely on a company with a reputation for ruthlessly shutting down failed ventures is another matter.

 

What's wrong with UP/Advanced Messaging? 

Where do I start?! Well, perhaps by pointing out what actually has changed for the positive. It's true that Google is offering a hosted RCS platform for operators that don't yet have an IMS. ("Effectively sponsoring this piece" - link). That's helpful as it reduces friction and cost of operators getting RCS to market. So to does having a pre-certified set of devices that should work with that platform, or in-house deployments. 

But while perhaps those are necessary, they are very far from being sufficient. Many other problems and concerns abound.

The biggest lie about RCS and the “universal profile” is that it will become universal or ubiquitous. Not only is Apple not likely to support it, but it is far from clear that Android OEMs will implement it on all their devices, especially those sold in the open market. It is unlikely to have good PC support (although to be fair, neither does Whatsapp). It is unlikely to be downloaded onto older Android phones. It is unlikely to work smoothly on dual/multi-SIM handsets, of which there are hundreds of millions. It’s unlikely to work well on many MVNOs’ devices (neither does VoLTE). It’s also unlikely to work nicely on the vast plethora of smart IoT devices that support SMS – even those with decent web-browsers and app downloads. 

I've seen some of the projections for RCS-capable handset penetration, and I think they're significantly over-enthusiastic, especially if considered on a country-by-country basis.

There is no relevance of RCS for the enterprise UCaaS and vertical markets that telcos urgently need to focus on. That has to integrate with all manner of other communications services that seem unlikely to have more than a loose coupling with RCS, if at all. It won't be replacing email, Office365, Cisco Spark, Slack, HipChat and numerous other collaboration tools, not to mention the universe of video-conferencing. It's also going to be a long time before it becomes another channel in contact centres' multi-channel platforms - there's a long list of bigger fish, especially if WhatsApp and Facebook offer APIs to billions of users.

The MaaP approach seems doomed to failure – there are no examples of successful technology platforms that have not been based on successful technology products first. Trying to pre-guess the requirements for a platform – let alone creating voluminous standards for it - ignores a wealth of experience: customers use products in unexpected ways, with spikes in viral adoption, unpredictable demographic biases, emergent behaviour and geographical patchiness.

Platforms are created in response to a product’s growth, not pre-ordained. Nobody predicted that Snapchat had the potential to become a media channel and camera/AR platform – those angles represent reactions to actual real-world usage, as well as improvements in “adjacent” technology in the interim. More importantly, developers are unlikely to become interested until there is evidence of real-world usage among a decent slice of their target audiences. You'd have to be a brave airline to ditch your native apps, ignore Facebook and WeChat and iMessage, and port your main loyalty "experience" to a mini-app inside the RCS client.

There are assorted other problems lurking as well - interconnect and roaming should be interesting. Will it really be free to do video-sharing and file-transfer to your friend in Singapore? Trying to work out the pricing aspects will be challenging too - unless everything is free, for everyone, and to everyone. While that might be feasible for post-paid customers with big data quotas, it's unlikely to translate to the worlds billions of prepay users. 

It's slow to evolve, as it's designed by committee. It's not set up to do A/B testing on live audiences - maybe 100 million on a redesign first, to see how it goes and then make a call on full rollout. Standardisation and interoperability doesn't work with the agile, devops approach to apps that is de-rigeur here.

And another of the herd of elephants - what's it for? Who is going to use it, and why? I can't foresee any case-studies of teenagers saying "I used to SnapChat my friends all the time, but now we only use HyperMessage+ from NetworkXYZ!". Is it just generic SMS-style "Hi, I'm running 5mins late" stuff? But with "rich" elements, at least insofar as the person you're connecting with is another RCS user who can see them? Why else are people going to use it, except maybe as some sort of lower-than-lowest common denominator? And moreover, whats going to keep them using it, given how dynamic the communications app market is. Unless it can capture the "cool" factor, it's toast.

This is the problem - pretty much everyone can get WhatsApp or WeChat or Facebook. There's a 90%+ chance your friends are on your platform of choice and have no reason to switch. iMessage is the obvious anomaly, but it's more of a hygiene factor between Apple users - who often also have multiple devices like tablets and Macs as well, and who expect to "fall back" to FB or WA for friends (or groups of friends) who aren't Apple users. I guess in low-Apple penetration countries there could be tighter communities of Android buddies, but they may well include people with a lot of prepay accounts, older open-market handsets (some multi-SIM) and little likelihood to upgrade to a new UP-powered one soon. (One possible exception is India, given Reliance Jio's influence). 

So what should you do? (Or not do?)

If you’re the head of advanced communications at an operator, or looking into future voice and video services, don’t bother wasting your time in Barcelona on RCS or "advanced messaging". 

Sure, speak to vendors and look at cheap ways to implement VoLTE. The industry painted itself into a corner with a horrendously complex and expensive approach, so finding quick/simple/reliable ways to launch or scale it make sense. (Think open-source, cloud-based, pseudo-NFV for IMS without the hugely complex MANOs etc). VoLTE is becoming increasingly mainstream, although its adoption in many operators' networks is quite gradual. Insofar as the Universal Profile helps with handset/network interop for voice calls, it has a role to play.

But beyond VoLTE, operators and handset OEMs need to ignore the exhortations of the GSMA to implement so-called “Advanced Messaging” (I wrote that before I realised the acronym spells SCAM). It will soak up money, technical and marketing resources, customer attention and credibility. Even if the Google-hosted RCS platform reduces the cost of operators deploying their own servers, it will still need testing, integration with in-house IMS platforms and new NFV systems and other actions.

Be very very skeptical of all the announcements. Any user statistics should be scrutinised carefully - while some operators technically have RCS servers live, the key statistic that won’t be mentioned is how many active users are doing anything beyond basic SMS-type messaging. How many are actually using RCS properly - and like it? The reality is that essentially zero people have switched from using Facebook Messenger, WeChat or Snapchat to using RCS for any meaningful purposes – and a reasonable forecast for 2019 would be roughly zero as well.

Go and see genuine innovators in messaging and communications platforms for inspiration. Have a look at the various business UCaaS providers. Seek out anything based on WebRTC. Speak to the cPaaS providers & talk about partnerships. Look for open-source platforms for infrastructure and IMS (eg from Metaswitch & Canonical). Track down in-app messaging, or ways to hook IoT devices' signalling traffic into the mix (MQTT and so on). Look for companies doing interesting things with SMS - it's not dead, especially for A2P uses. Look at what some vendors are operators are doing with 2nd/3rd-generation API platforms for developers.

There are dozens of clever options for messaging innovation available for operators (or MVNOs, cPaaS providers, UCaaS players and other types of SPs). RCS is not one of them.
It's notable that in all of the GSMA's literature & commentary I've been able to find, I've seen almost zero mentions of these words: Viral, Fun, Snapchat, Slack, Instagram, Emoji, Twilio. But there's lots of "interoperable" and "rich" and scare-stories about telephony ARPU.

Although, ironically, GSMA's own Twitter avatar is a SnapChat ghost at the moment. And it has its own Snap channel (link). Maybe if it announces at MWC that SnapChat is transitioning to/interconnecting with RCS it'd be a gamechanger. But otherwise, it speaks volumes that it's promoting one of the Internet success stories in 2017 messaging.

As I've said before: Ubiquity is earned, not imposed. RCS stilll needs to prove that users actually want it before it can have pretensions to being a platform. For now, remember So-Called Advanced Messaging is still a failure - it's an unfortunate acronym, but amusingly appropriate. If the Universal Profile had just been about implementing - and improving - VoLTE to improve the telephony experience, it would make sense. Instead, it's been weighed down with a lot of harmful baggage.


 
If you're thinking "So what else should I do instead?" or "How do I stop my management team making an expensive mistake?" then you're in the right place. Contact me about possible workshops or other advice. information AT disruptive-analysis DOT com