Taking a big step towards creating a mass market of IMS-compliant mobile handsets, providing next generation rich communication services, the GSMA RCS program will release its first service specifications in December 2008.

In the beginning of 2008, a few key industry players joined forces to speed up the introduction of interoperable rich communication mobile services and established the Rich Communication Suite (RCS) Initiative. In October 2008, the RCS work was taken over by the GSM Association (GSMA), and today it is a industry-wide program supported by more than 35 major telecom companies, including leading network operators (such as Orange, France Telecom, Telecom Italia Mobile, Telefónica O2, Softbank, and NTT DoCoMo), network-infrastructure vendors (such as Ericsson, Nokia Siemens Networks, and Alcatel-Lucent) and the top five mobile-device vendors (Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and LG Electronics).

Rajiv Bhatia is RCS portfolio marketing manager at Ericsson and one of the company’s representatives in the GSMA RCS program. He says the program is not about developing new standards but taking existing applicable standards and specifying how to implement these to achieve interoperable, enriched communications.

The RCS specification work is planned in phases. “The ambition of the first phase, for which the plan is to release specifications before the end of this year, is to specify a uniform end-user experience, independent of which handset you use or what network you are connected to,” Bhatia explains.

 The core features of RCS phase one are:

• Enhanced Phonebook, with service capabilities and enhanced presence information
• Enhanced Messaging, enabling a large variety of messaging options, such as chat
• Enriched Call, enabling multimedia content sharing during a voice call.

The phase one specifications will primarily affect handset client software, Bhatia says, but also have some impact on network nodes.

An important part of the GSMA RCS program is interoperability testing (IOT). So far these have been hosted mainly by network vendors, such as Ericsson and Nokia. Going forward however, there will be more operator-hosted IOTs, Bhatia says.

“For RCS to be mass-market successful, we see the need for operators in a market to work together to deploy these interoperable services,” Bhatia says. “In France, for instance, where all the three big players in the mobile market are members of RCS, we can see that momentum already taking place.”

Bhatia believes we will start to see commercial RCS handsets in the second half of 2009. “That’s when we think operators plan to do RCS commercial pilots, so that should also be when the device vendors start rolling out RCS-compliant handsets in the mass market,” he says.

RCS is also a big step forward for developers, Bhatia says: “We have long been waiting for IMS capabilities in the handsets, and RCS is pretty much that step. And I expect that in a few years time most handsets will be RCS enabled, opening up IMS to mass-market reach.”

Bhatia stresses the differences between RCS and internet services such as MSN, Yahoo, and Google. “Most chat-like communication services on the internet end up as silos,” he says. “You typically have your MSN friends, your Yahoo friends, and your Google friends. But RCS will provide uniform, global, all-to-all connectivity, just like SMS, created using the existing native phone address book.”

Press release
Ericsson article
GSMA RCS Site
Ericsson RCS White Paper

By Benny Ritzén