📡 The Big Story
Sinch Adds Tier 1 RCS in Canada, Completing Its North American Map
Verdict: 🔥 Actually huge (with an asterisk)
Sinch just expanded its Tier 1 RCS Business Messaging coverage to Canada, completing its North American footprint. Translation: a brand can now run verified RCS campaigns, logo and checkmark included, across North America through one provider. If you've never run a cross-border messaging program, that sounds like a press release. If you have, you just exhaled.
Here's why it matters. Canada's wireless market is dominated by a handful of big carriers, so Tier 1 coverage there isn't a nice-to-have. It's the whole ballgame. The CPaaS race has also quietly changed. Ever since Apple finally put RCS on the iPhone in 2024, nobody asks "will RCS happen?" anymore. They ask "who can actually deliver it, carrier-grade, everywhere my customers live?" Retailers, banks, and airlines don't stop at the 49th parallel. Their messaging vendors shouldn't either.
Now the asterisk. One provider doesn't mean one rulebook. You're still juggling TCPA consent on one side of the border and CASL on the other, and Quebec's French-language rules don't care how many carriers your vendor signed. Coverage gets you in the door. Fast brand verification, sane pricing, and bulletproof SMS fallback keep you there. But the bar just moved. "We support RCS" is table stakes now. "We cover North America at Tier 1" is the new flex.
🔥 What's Moving
EZ Texting Hands RCS to 230,000+ Small Businesses
Verdict: 👀 Interesting...
EZ Texting launched RCS Business Messaging on September 22, putting branded, interactive texting in front of its 230,000+ small business customers. The headline promises "7x higher engagement." The body says 3x to 7x higher click-through rates than standard SMS. Somewhere between the body copy and the headline, 3x quietly left the building. Also it's "AI-powered," because it's 2026 and I'm pretty sure that's legally required now.
Snark aside, this is the RCS story I'd actually watch. Enterprise pilots are nice, but the volume lives with the salons, gyms, and dental offices. The CTR lift is real for a boring reason: give people a big tappable button instead of a naked link and they tap it. The question is whether a five-person business can get through brand verification and build a decent rich card without hiring a consultant. If EZ Texting makes that easy, it's a big deal. If not, it's a feature page.
The FCC Wants Everyone to Turn On Their Spam Filters
Verdict: 😴 on paper, 👀 in practice
The FCC published consumer guides walking people through the call and text blocking tools built into the biggest carriers' networks and the most popular phones. A government agency writing how-to guides is not, on its face, riveting stuff. (The carriers, whose blocking tools just got free federal advertising, would disagree.)
But think about what it means if you send business texts. The regulator is now actively telling consumers to crank up filtering on the receiving end, and filters don't read intent. They read signals: registration, reputation, complaint rates, links. If your traffic is registered, opted-in, and actually wanted, you'll mostly be fine. If you're running sketchy links, stale lists, or unregistered traffic, the FCC just handed your recipients the instructions for making you disappear.
A2P SMS Forecast to Hit $112.7B by 2034
Verdict: 💀 RIP (to every "SMS is dead" take)
A new Intel Market Research report pegs the global enterprise A2P SMS market at $62.3 billion in 2025, growing 6.4% a year to $112.7 billion by 2034, driven by retail, finance, and healthcare. So in the same week everyone's hyping RCS, plain old SMS is projected to nearly double. That's not a contradiction. Every RCS campaign needs a fallback for the phones that can't do RCS, and that fallback is SMS.
Should you trust a nine-year forecast to the decimal point? No. Compound $62.3 billion at 6.4% for nine years and you get about $109 billion, not $112.7 billion. Market sizing is astrology with spreadsheets. But the direction is right, and I'd bet on it.
🏆 Winner of the Week: Small businesses, because your local pizza place can now send the kind of branded, button-filled texts that used to require a Fortune 500 budget.
📉 Loser of the Week: Spammers, now that the federal government is personally handing out instructions for ignoring them.
📊 By the Numbers
- 200 billion+: Business RCS messages expected globally by 2027, up from 70 billion in 2025, per Juniper Research (via Telecom Reseller). That's nearly triple in two years. Somebody has to actually deliver all that, which is exactly why the coverage land grab matters.
- 95%+: Share of mobile users enterprise A2P SMS reaches, per Intel Market Research. That's why SMS survives every obituary. RCS is the upgrade. SMS is the guarantee.
- 42%: A2P SMS's supposed share of "all digital communications," per the same report, which says that 95% reach "translates" into it. I've read that sentence four times. Would love to see the methodology. 🤡
🔮 What We're Watching
- Black Friday (November 27), RCS's first real small business stress test. Q4 is when every brand floods every inbox at once. We're about to find out whether "3x to 7x" holds up when the pizza place, the boutique, and three national retailers are all sending carousels on the same Friday morning. My guess: the lift survives, but shrinks. Novelty has a half-life.
- Who answers Sinch. Every CPaaS sales team with North American customers is getting asked "do you cover Canada?" this week. Watch who comes back with a real answer and who comes back with a roadmap slide.
💡 The Hot Take
RCS is about to get its 10DLC moment, and the industry is sprinting straight at it.
I've been in this industry long enough to have seen this movie twice. Long codes got abused, so we got 10DLC. Toll-free got abused, so we got toll-free verification. Now look at what just happened: rich messaging jumped from enterprise pilots to hundreds of thousands of small businesses, while the FCC taught every consumer in America how to crank up their spam filters. Hand a shiny new channel with "7x engagement" to that many senders heading into Q4, and some of them will treat it like a brand-new firehose. Complaints climb. Engagement craters. The gatekeepers respond.
My prediction: before the end of 2027, we'll see the first RCS spam wave big enough to make mainstream headlines, and the fix will be ongoing trust scores and throughput tiers that look a lot like 10DLC. Plenty of the people cheering loudest today will be complaining about vetting fees tomorrow. The winners won't be whoever adopted RCS first. They'll be whoever treated consent and relevance as the product and the channel as the delivery truck. Because here's the thing: put a carousel on a bad message and you've just got a bad message in high-res.
