this post was submitted on 15 May 2025
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RCS only works when its connected to the internet. Not everyone has unlimited data, and the 128 kb throttled data after using up the fast data is slow as molasses that sites would fail to load and it's likely a reason why messaging would just revert back to SMS/MMS. (And some people don't even have the "unlimited 128 kb/s" after their fast data runs out)
They need to make RCS not require internet. Or carriers need to stop being greedy and just not count RCS data usage as actual data usage. (The data use is so insignificant it should not cause congestion anyways)
With today's internet, where a normal page is larger than the original Doom, throttled internet is basically no internet.
Or you can just disable RCS and solve the issue for yourself
Yes. Disabling RCS is the first thing I do on every new phone. Nobody uses text messages in my country anyway.
128 Kb/s? Where do you live?
In the US, its a common thing.
Before, it's actually just X GB data, you run out, you have nothing.
Then later it became "Unlimited, X GB of 4G/5G Data*" with a huge asterisk
Then in the fine print:
*After X GB is exceeded, speeds is reduced to 128 KB/s
Which is just a fancy way of saying: X GB Real data, after that we're just trolling you with the unusable slow as molasses "data" and trying to get you to buy more data.
This is because these are the older, cheap plans. Like these plans could be anywhere from $15 to $30, per month. The real unlimited plans are not gonna be cheap.
Right now, I pay like $60 /month to have unlimited data + unlimited hotspot at reasonable speeds (like 15-25 Mbits up/down if its not congested) I do have wifi at home, but that's a family network that don't trust (long story, but I have trust issues with family)
I have Straight Talk with unlimited everything for $45/mo.
This is common in the US when you run out of paid high speed data for your cell phone plan. They throttle your speeds to 128kbps so you technically have "unlimited data at 3G speeds" but it's basically barely usable.
So then explain why everyone in the rest of the world uses Whatsapp and not SMS. You're telling me they've all had unlimited data for the last 10 years?
When you use an app like Whatsapp, if you try to send a message witbout internet, it gets queued until you get internet.
With RCS, if it fails, it doesn't get queued, it automatically falls back to SMS/MMS, which is how they got those stats.
I mean, I'd say a majority of messages send on 3rd party platforms in developing countries are probably "sent" while offline, but only actually gets delivered when they are on wifi.
If this were RCS, they would've just get converted to become SMS/MMS, which is how those statistics came to be. RCS that gets downgraded will never count as using RCS.