RCS for Business at 485 Billion Messages: A Carrier's View
- Yashar Sabunchi
- 4 days ago
- 7 min read
Juniper Research expects business RCS traffic to reach 485 billion messages a year by 2030, up from 125 billion in 2026, and operator revenue from the channel to pass USD 7 billion over the same period. The forecast was carried across the messaging trade press in the week of 19 August 2026.
Sigma Telecom has been in telecom since 2003, based in Istanbul, and trading wholesale since 2014, when it moved from infrastructure work into wholesale VoIP for operators, carriers and vendors. It carries more than 300 million messages a month over SMPP, HTTP and SS7, and more than 150 million voice minutes a month, across 1,000+ interconnections reaching 190+ countries.
A forecast of this shape is easy to read as a replacement story: RCS grows, SMS shrinks, and the wholesale messaging business changes underneath it. The numbers do not say that. What follows is what the forecast supports, what it does not, and the questions a buyer of wholesale SMS should be putting to suppliers this year.
What the forecast actually says
Juniper Research published its RCS for Business market forecast in August 2026. The headline figures, as reported by TelecomLead:
Metric | Figure | Period |
|---|---|---|
Business RCS traffic | 125 billion messages | 2026 |
Business RCS traffic | 485 billion messages | 2030 |
Traffic growth | 286% | 2026 to 2030 |
Operator RCS revenue | USD 1.2 billion | 2025 |
Operator RCS revenue | USD 2 billion | 2026 |
Operator RCS revenue | USD 3.1 billion | 2027 |
Operator RCS revenue | Over USD 7 billion | 2030 |
US business RCS traffic | 494 million messages | 2024 |
US business RCS traffic | 3.2 billion messages | 2025 |
The growth rate is real. Traffic that nearly quadruples in four years is a genuine shift in the channel mix, and the operator revenue line indicates operators are being paid for it rather than carrying it as a cost of staying current.
The share is smaller than the headline suggests. Juniper's wider business messaging forecast, published in September 2025, put total business messaging traffic across SMS, RCS and OTT channels at around 2 trillion messages in 2025, rising to close to 3 trillion by 2030. Set 485 billion against that and RCS accounts for roughly one business message in six at the end of the decade. Fastest-growing and largest are different claims; only the first is supported.
The revenue figure is a channel total. USD 7 billion spread across every operator carrying RCS says nothing about what an individual route earns. It is evidence of commercial weight, not a pricing signal.
Where the growth actually is
The forecast is not evenly distributed. Two markets carry most of it.
North America. RCS-capable device penetration went from 40.3% in 2024 to 86.5% in 2025 on Juniper's numbers, and US business RCS traffic grew from 494 million messages in 2024 to 3.2 billion in 2025. Google said in May 2025 that more than a billion RCS messages a day were being sent in the US, though that figure includes person-to-person traffic.
India. Juniper counts 640.0 million RCS-capable subscribers in India in 2024, 696.1 million in 2025, and forecasts 824.8 million for 2026. Two operator moves sit behind that: Apple's August 2025 partnership with Jio brought RCS to iPhone users on that network, and Bharti Airtel began working with Google in December 2025.
Everywhere else. Whether a message can be delivered as RCS depends on two conditions the sender does not control: whether the destination operator has launched the service, and whether the handset supports it. Neither is a routing decision. A campaign aimed at a spread of countries resolves to RCS in some and to SMS in the rest, and that split is a property of the destination, not a measure of the supplier.
RCS does not route the way SMS routes
A2P SMS is a wholesale market in the ordinary sense. A message reaches a handset because a carrier holds an interconnection that terminates there and selected a route for it. A buyer can ask which path the traffic takes, compare delivery performance destination by destination, and move volume when the numbers move.
RCS Business Messaging is mediated differently. Juniper's September 2025 research made the consequence explicit: operators face difficulty capitalising on RCS business messaging because their visibility into that traffic depends on Google's monitoring systems rather than their own. That is structural, not a complaint, but visibility is the precondition for route management. A carrier that cannot see per-destination delivery behaviour cannot do what wholesale carriers are bought for, which is to notice a route degrading and change it before the customer does.
For a buyer, RCS today is closer to a platform relationship than an interconnect relationship. It should be procured and measured on that basis, not assumed to inherit the reporting granularity of an SMPP bind.
The fallback leg is where the volume still sits
Every RCS campaign needs an answer for the recipients it cannot reach as RCS, and that answer is SMS. This is the least-discussed part of the transition and the most consequential: moving a programme to RCS does not reduce a sender's need for SMS termination. It changes what the SMS leg is for.
The SMS leg stops being the whole campaign and becomes the remainder — and outside the two markets above, the remainder is still most of the recipients. It is also, by construction, the traffic with the least favourable delivery conditions — precisely what RCS could not take. Reach across 190+ countries, and route depth into each of them, still decides whether a campaign completes. Nothing in the forecast suggests that changes before 2030.
Verified sending is why the banks move first
The use cases Juniper expects to migrate earliest are one-time passwords and account alerts in banking and logistics, where the cost of a spoofed message is high. The driver is not richer media. It is that the recipient can tell who sent it.
The GSMA published RCS Universal Profile 3.0 in March 2025, adding interoperable end-to-end encryption based on the Messaging Layer Security protocol — in the GSMA's words, the first large-scale messaging service to support interoperable encryption between client implementations from different providers. Universal Profile 3.1 followed in July 2025 with encrypted file transfer, cryptographic validation intended to reduce impersonation and malware risk, and improved spam reporting.
The caveat is the one from the previous section: none of this reaches the fallback leg. A one-time password that fails over to SMS travels as SMS, on whatever route it was given. Sender verification on RCS does not clean up a grey route underneath it. An enterprise that upgrades its channel without examining its SMS routing has improved the part of the journey that was already safer.
What to ask a wholesale supplier this year
Across Sigma's services, the questions that separate a serious messaging supplier from a reseller have not changed much. The RCS transition sharpens four.
Fallback handling. Ask what happens to a message that cannot be delivered as RCS. Is the SMS leg routed by the same party, on the same commercial terms, with the same delivery reporting? Or is it handed off and effectively unmeasured?
Per-destination reporting. Ask for delivery data broken down by destination rather than by campaign. A blended rate hides exactly the routes that need attention, and it is hardest to obtain on the RCS leg for the reasons above.
Compliance posture. Ask what the supplier is certified against and what that certification covers. Sigma is ISO certified and PCI DSS certified and has been an ITU sector member since 2018. Certification is not a delivery guarantee, but it tells a buyer what has been audited.
Support model. Ask who answers at 03:00 when a route degrades, and what they can change. Sigma runs a 24/7 NOC across messaging and international voice services, with SMS panel throughput of 600,000+ deliveries per hour for bulk and A2P traffic.
Frequently asked questions
Does RCS replace A2P SMS?
Not on the current forecast. Juniper Research projects 485 billion business RCS messages a year by 2030, against total business messaging traffic of close to 3 trillion messages in the same year. That puts RCS at roughly one business message in six. RCS is growing quickly, but SMS remains the channel carrying most business traffic through the end of the decade.
Why are banks and logistics firms moving to RCS first?
Because the problem RCS solves for them is impersonation. One-time passwords and account alerts sent over SMS can be spoofed, and industries exposed to that risk gain the most from a verified sender. The GSMA's RCS Universal Profile 3.0, published in March 2025, added interoperable end-to-end encryption based on the Messaging Layer Security protocol, which the GSMA described as the first large-scale messaging service to support interoperable encryption between clients from different providers.
If a message cannot be delivered as RCS, what happens to it?
It falls back to SMS. Whether a recipient can receive RCS depends on the destination operator having launched the service and on the handset supporting it, and neither is under the sender's control. Adopting RCS therefore does not remove the need for SMS termination. It changes the SMS leg from the whole campaign into the remainder, which in most markets is still the majority of recipients.
Can a wholesale carrier route RCS the way it routes SMS?
Not in the same way today. A2P SMS moves over bilateral interconnections that a carrier selects and manages per destination. RCS Business Messaging is mediated by a platform layer, and Juniper Research reported in September 2025 that operators have limited visibility into RCS business messaging on their own networks because they rely on Google's monitoring systems. Less visibility means less route management, so RCS is better procured as a platform relationship than assumed to behave like an SMPP bind.
Does verified sending on RCS reduce SMS fraud exposure?
Only on the RCS leg. A message that falls back to SMS travels on whatever route it was given, so sender verification in RCS does not improve the integrity of the route underneath it. Grey routes, artificially inflated traffic and sender-ID abuse remain SMS problems, addressed by route selection, traffic monitoring and supplier diligence rather than by a channel upgrade.
What should an aggregator ask a supplier about RCS today?
Four things: who routes the SMS fallback and on what terms, whether delivery data is available per destination rather than blended, what the supplier is certified against, and who is reachable when a route degrades outside business hours. The first two are where most of the commercial risk in a mixed programme sits.
These are the conversations Sigma has at industry events including ITW, Capacity, GCCM, MWC and Messaging & SMS World. To discuss messaging or voice routing for a specific set of destinations, use the contact page or write to info@sigmatelecom.com.
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