The Rich Communication Suite (RCS) initiative was established in 2008 by key industry players – network operators, and mobile device and network infrastructure vendors – to speed up the introduction of interoperable rich communication mobile services. Today, more than 41 companies support the initiative.

In October 2008, the work on the RCS was taken over by the GSMA, with the aim of simplifying the rollout of new services based on the initial specification.

Victor de la Torre, RCS Sales Development Manager at Ericsson, says that the company has developed a GSMA RCS-aligned solution, and that this will be used in the Telefónica trial.

“When launching new multimedia services, operators like Telefónica are most concerned about ways to enhance the user experience,” he says.

“RCS is built around an enhancement of the existing phone book in the handset, and thus removes the need to create a new community or list of contacts. It shows pictures and taglines of your contacts and it broadens the variety of messaging options to include chat and messaging history. It also enables you to share multimedia content during a voice call.”

De la Torre says the solution enables the user to do more things on their phones, making their lives easier and improving their experience. “We are creating solutions, not by copying the internet experience, but by adapting it to mobile needs and experience. This is key if mobile operators are to successfully market a new generation of IMS-based services,” he says.

Visitors to Ericsson’s stand in Hall 6 or the Telefónica space at the Mobile World Congress will be able to experience these new services themselves.

De la Torre says: “This year we expect a lot more trials like the one with Telefónica. Several operators are planning consumer trials and others are preparing to launch the RCS at the end of the year. The plan is that RCS is going to the market in 2009.”