> My novice read of it is that Google made the mistake of trying to hand off the management burden to carriers, since they felt that the way to make something universal like SMS/MMS is to include carrier support.
I'm not sure who you are calling "carriers", but it sounds like the people who own a mobile network. They buy gear off a supplier like Nokia / Huawei, contract them to install and maintain it, then make their money back over time by selling the bandwidth to consumers and hopefully a "free" phone as well.
They aren't the engineering power houses the telco's of old were, like AT&T. Rather they are reverse - a marketing powerhouse, duking it out with other marketing power houses. Their technical know how is close to 0. In fact on the retail support side, it might even be negative. When I deal with them, I come away with the impression would have trouble fixing a propelling pencil. If Google thought they could manage a massively parallel e2e messaging stack, they were deluding themselves.
This is the real reason Huawei was banned by the West. It wasn't just that it meant they were using Chinese make the gear, with opaque Chinese firmware, although I guess that was bad enough. It was that if the telco's bought Huawei, Huawei ran it for them. "Ran" means hands on, 24 hours a day, with in Huawei engineers deployed around the country keeping it ticking. Having a Chinese company running your countries mobile phone infrastructure was an impossible swallow.
I'm not sure who you are calling "carriers", but it sounds like the people who own a mobile network. They buy gear off a supplier like Nokia / Huawei, contract them to install and maintain it, then make their money back over time by selling the bandwidth to consumers and hopefully a "free" phone as well.
They aren't the engineering power houses the telco's of old were, like AT&T. Rather they are reverse - a marketing powerhouse, duking it out with other marketing power houses. Their technical know how is close to 0. In fact on the retail support side, it might even be negative. When I deal with them, I come away with the impression would have trouble fixing a propelling pencil. If Google thought they could manage a massively parallel e2e messaging stack, they were deluding themselves.
This is the real reason Huawei was banned by the West. It wasn't just that it meant they were using Chinese make the gear, with opaque Chinese firmware, although I guess that was bad enough. It was that if the telco's bought Huawei, Huawei ran it for them. "Ran" means hands on, 24 hours a day, with in Huawei engineers deployed around the country keeping it ticking. Having a Chinese company running your countries mobile phone infrastructure was an impossible swallow.