📡 The Big Story
California to AT&T: "You're Lying to the FCC"
Well, this got spicy fast. On June 15, the California Public Utilities Commission filed paperwork formally accusing AT&T of misleading the FCC about the state's stance on copper retirement. AT&T's been telling Washington that California is blocking carriers from ditching copper and investing in fiber. California's response? "It is not and has never been true." That's regulator-speak for "you're full of it."
Here's why anyone outside California should care: the copper-to-wireless transition is the single biggest infrastructure shift happening in legacy voice right now, and it directly impacts everything downstream, including SMS routing, 911, alarm systems, and rural connectivity. If AT&T gets a clean federal sign-off to kill copper while states are still negotiating replacement obligations, every other ILEC follows. If California wins this round, the FCC's whole copper sunset framework gets a lot messier.
Look, copper needs to die. Nobody's defending 1950s infrastructure. But "we're shutting this off and good luck" isn't a transition plan, it's an eviction notice. The fact that a state regulator is willing to publicly call a carrier a liar in an FCC filing tells you how badly the trust has eroded. Buckle up.
🔥 What's Moving
TCPA Filings Up 28.2% YoY 💀
Fresh data from Mohr Marketing shows TCPA lawsuit filings surged 28.2% in the first four months of 2026. Remember when everyone thought the Supreme Court's recent narrowing decisions would calm things down? Yeah, no. Plaintiffs' lawyers found new theories faster than carriers found new acronyms. If you're sending marketing SMS without an audit trail tighter than a TSA checkpoint, you're basically a walking settlement.
Singtel Lights Up Cross-Platform RCS in Singapore 🔥
Singtel became the first Singapore carrier to enable RCS across iPhone and Android by default, riding the iOS 26.3 wave. APAC has been the quiet RCS story all year, and this matters because Singapore is the regional CPaaS hub. Every RBM-curious enterprise in Southeast Asia just got a working reference deployment. Expect Malaysia and Indonesia carriers to follow within 90 days.
FTC: $470M Lost to Text Scams in 2024 👀
The FTC's number is out and it's ugly: Americans reported $470 million in losses from text-originated scams in 2024, and AI is making detection harder. This is the stat that justifies every annoying registration hoop the carriers put us through, and also the one that explains why those hoops aren't working. The scammers aren't using 10DLC short codes registered through TCR. They're using burner SIMs and gateway SIM farms. Fix the right problem.
South Africa Moves to A2P Traffic Separation 👀
At Telemedia Johannesburg last week, operators and regulators signaled formal P2P/A2P separation is coming. This is the same playbook India, Nigeria, and Brazil ran. Translation for enterprise senders: prices in ZAR are about to go up, and gray routes are about to die. If you're sending to South Africa today through some suspiciously cheap aggregator, enjoy it while it lasts.
🏆 Winner of the Week: Singaporean iPhone users who can finally send a video to their Android friends without it looking like a Bigfoot sighting.
📉 Loser of the Week: AT&T's legal team, which now has to argue in two venues that California both wants to ban fiber AND is lying about wanting to ban fiber. Pick a lane.
📊 By the Numbers
- $470M lost to smishing in 2024 per the FTC. For context, that's roughly the GDP of a small Caribbean nation, transferred to people pretending to be USPS.
- 28.2% jump in TCPA filings in just four months. Compliance isn't a cost center anymore, it's survival.
- 1 Singapore carrier with full cross-platform RCS. A year ago this number was zero in most of APAC. The S-curve is real.
🔮 What We're Watching
The FCC's response to California. AT&T's copper retirement filings are pending. Does the Commission acknowledge California's accusation or quietly move forward? Either answer sets precedent for every other state-versus-ILEC fight queued up behind this one.
Healthcare TCPA enforcement actions. With new 2026 guidance narrowing the exemptions that hospitals and nonprofits leaned on for years, the first big enforcement case is going to be a wake-up call. Appointment reminders that drift into marketing territory are the obvious target. If you run patient communications, audit your templates now, not after the demand letter.
💡 The Hot Take
Here's my bold take for the week: the messaging industry's compliance regime is failing on both ends simultaneously, and nobody wants to admit it.
On the enterprise side, we've built a Byzantine registration system (10DLC, TCR, brand vetting, campaign approvals, throughput tiers) that makes it harder than ever for a legitimate small business to send a text. Meanwhile, TCPA filings are up 28% because the system doesn't actually stop bad actors, it just creates audit trails for plaintiffs' lawyers to mine. On the consumer side, $470 million in smishing losses says the carriers' filtering is catching legitimate appointment reminders while letting "your package is delayed, click here" sail through.
The honest answer is that compliance theater and fraud prevention got conflated about five years ago, and we're now paying for it in both directions. The carriers want CPaaS providers to police senders. The CPaaS providers want carriers to filter traffic. The regulators want both. And the scammers, who don't read any of these memos, keep winning.
My prediction: by Q1 2027, at least one major US carrier will roll out a verified-sender-only inbound tier (think DMARC for SMS) and charge enterprises a premium to be in it. Everything else gets second-class delivery. It'll be controversial, it'll be expensive, and it'll be the only thing that actually moves the needle. You heard it here first.
