The Future of Wireless: The Next 10 Years --- As the reach of Rich Communications Services (RCS) grows in the United States, so does its viability as an A2P channel for brands and enterprises that are looking for the ideal place to engage their customers and improve the user experience. To date, A2P RCS campaigns typically have focused on use cases centered on e-commerce and customer support, but clearly these applications represent only the tip of the iceberg in terms of the potential. With the number of RCS users in the U.S. projected to increase from 19 million in 2019 to over 100 million in 2022,1 the diversity of use cases is poised to explode and a key growth segment that presents a unique opportunity for human-to-machine communications using RCS is the Internet of Things (IoT).
The IoT space is expected to see significant growth over the coming years with the GSMA predicting the number of IoT connections to surge from 9.1 billion in 2018 to 25.2 billion in 2025, with over 50% of growth attributable to the Smart Home and Smart Building sub-segments. Despite strong growth projections, IoT is faced with some fundamental hurdles, not the least of which is fragmentation. This fragmentation is prevalent on both ends of the value chain. On the IoT device side, endpoints are using disparate, and sometimes proprietary, communication protocols that inhibit the ability for devices to communicate with each other or be aggregated with device hubs. The Smart Home sub-segment has recognized this problem and several leading device manufacturers including Amazon, Apple, and Google have teamed up with the Zigbee Alliance to form a working group to address it.2 However, fragmentation still remains an issue on the user experience side.
Many device OEMs have unique apps that users must download to access Smart Home devices when they’re on the go. For users with multiple devices, this introduces inconvenience into a system intended to make their lives easier. Bouncing between different applications is a main problem that RCS was developed to solve. Why can’t those devices communicate directly with users where they are accustomed to communicating — within the single, native messaging application on their mobile device?
Read the full article in the CCA Voice
