Exclusive: Telstra enables RCS messaging– but not for the reason you might expect

Just days after EFTM reached out to all three telcos to check on the progress of RCS messaging in Australia, we have our first mover, Telstra is enabling RCS messaging in the next month for its customers across the network.

A support page on the Telstra website outlines exactly how and when it’ll be implemented, as well as some frequently asked questions around RCS, which allows customers to send rich text messages essentially via the Internet using the data component of your phone connection as opposed to the traditional mobile connection, which SMS messaging uses.

According to Telstra RCS will be available from mid-November “Rollout of RCS will begin for Android customers from 16th November and iOS customers will begin to be able to use RCS after December’s iOS release. Rollout of RCS features are scheduled for completion by the end of the year.”

Critically, as a first mover, RCS messaging will only work for between Telstra customers, so a Telstra customer with RCS messaging won’t guarantee to get an RCS connection with an Optus or Vodafone network customer.

Google and Android users might be saying, of course, they already have RCS in on some devices, and that’s true, but its limitation is essentially that it’s modern Android to modern Android only.

This implementation ensures that RCS works across the ecosystem, including Apple devices with iOS 27 installed.

It’s been basically three years since Apple announced its support for RCS messaging quietly at a worldwide developers conference in those three years, all three Aussie telcos have seemingly done very little about this.

Now, while it’s not a game changer for every customer, but many customers, this is a big deal, being able to send high-resolution photos instead of pixelated images to your friends on a different mobile device will improve communications for basic Australian users.

But while it is essentially helping Apple users the most, EFTM understands that the networks are under some small pressure from Google to implement RCS messaging, And perhaps that’s the reason why this change has been implemented. 

As noted earlier, there are limitations and it won’t be perfect from the start, but with Telstra on board, you can only imagine that will put a lot of pressure on the network teams and Vodafone and Optus to finally pull their finger out and do whatever work is required, spend whatever monies needed to implement RCS messaging across the Australian networks