How Big an Impact Will RCS Have?

“Rich Communications Suite” is one mobile service provider answer to the question of how carriers can compete with “over the top” messaging.

Juniper Research forecasts that RCS will support 83 billion messages each year in five years’ time. That still will be less than one percent of total messaging traffic in 2017, though.

Text messsaging (short message service, or SMS), instant messaging, social messaging and email will represent the vast majority of messages.

Juniper Research points out that it took about 30 years for text messaging to reach its current ubiquity, so RCS should not be expected to displace the older alternatives too quickly.

Mobile messaging traffic will nearly double from 14.7 trillion each year in 2012 to 28.2 trillion by 2017, Juniper Research also predicts.