In May 2007, a few key industry players, including Ericsson, joined forces and established the Rich Communication Suite (RCS) Initiative to speed up the introduction of commercial IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) services to enable interoperable, rich-communication mobile services.

In October 2008, the RCS work was taken over by the GSM Association (GSMA). Today it is an industry-wide program supported by more than 80 telecom companies, including carriers, equipment vendors and service providers, around the globe.

Rather than new standards, the RCS Initiative delivers – based on existing standards defined by forums such as 3GPP, ETSI, OMA, and GSMA – a set of features, implementation guidelines, use-case examples and demonstrations of interoperable reference implementations. RCS focuses on interconnection and interoperability requirements tied to a core, feature set of rich communication capabilities.

The RCS specification work is planned in phases. The first phase, for which specifications were released at the end of 2008, specified a uniform end-user experience, independent of which handset, or what kind of network, is used.

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.










A possible user experience for the RCS Enhanced Phonebook

Phase two specification has a convergent, broadband focus, and was released June 2009. It extends phase one capabilities to PCs, netbooks, and other internet devices. Phase three is currently being defined and is expected to be released at the end of this year.

An important part of the GSMA RCS program is interoperability testing (IOT). These tests include interoperability testing between various devices, such as mobile handsets and PC clients and interoperability in a multi-operator environment as well as sharing the RCS specifications with relevant industry forums.

During the 2009 Mobile World Congress (MWC), the three French operators, SFR, Orange and Bouygues Telecom, announced their plans to conduct a common interoperability trial during Q4 2009, which is the first real trial to implement RCS 1.0 across different operators.

Another RCS event during the 2009 MWC was Ericsson’s and Spanish operator Telefónica’s common trial of advanced multimedia applications based on the RCS standard.

Worth noticing is the difference between RCS and internet services such as MSN, Yahoo, and Google. Most chat-like communication services on the internet end up as silos. Users typically have MSN friends, Yahoo friends, and Google friends. But RCS will provide uniform, global, all-to-all connectivity, just like SMS, based on the existing, native phone address book. So from a third-party perspective, RCS is very important, because as a developer, you want to write an application without having to customize it for different clients.

See also:

GSMA RCS site
GSMA RCS White Paper  
Ericsson RCS site
Press release: RCS initiative
Ericsson article: Joint effort enables rich communication
Ericsson article: GSMA launches RCS 1.0 to boost IMS
Bouygues Telecom, Orange and SFR announce RCS user trial
Telefónica - Ericsson RCS trial at WMC 2009
RCS Business Initiative White Paper

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