As use of over-the-top (OTT) communications services continues to grow, demand for wireless data has soared. Today’s mobile network operators, while making infrastructure investments to meet this demand, also face declining messaging volumes and revenue due to the popularity of these third-party OTT alternatives. 

It’s day two of the CTIA show in Las Vegas, and the Interop team has been enjoying discussions with current and potential customers. The hot topic on operators’ minds is RCS—not whether they should offer this service to subscribers but rather how quickly they can get it up and running. The message is clear: over-the-top (OTT) services are having a dramatic impact on traditional messaging volumes, and operators realize they need to act now to maintain subscriber loyalty.

As smartphone penetration grows in Latin America, this region is experiencing the same negative effects of over-the-top (OTT) services that led operators in Europe, North America, and Asia to launch RCS. Indeed, it’s becoming increasingly clear that RCS, given its universal reach and telco-grade quality of service, is the best choice for operators to address the OTT threat, maintain subscriber loyalty, and preserve messaging revenues.

I often write about how OTTs can suffer from quality of service issues that operator-provided, standards-based services do not. I ran across an article last week that illustrates this point quite well. Path, a messaging app similar to WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, recently sent out an SMS to everyone in a group of users' phonebooks—from ex-boyfriends to business associates—indicating that the sender had photos available for them on Path. “Not the kind of thing you would want sent to your buddy's wife on a Friday night,” the article aptly notes.

Mobile users sent more messages with OTTs in 2012 than with SMS, according to a new research from Informa. It states that third-party app users sent an average of 19.1 billion messages per day in 2012, compared with 17.6 billion texts per day with SMS.