Interop and Testing

Interop and Testing (IOT) is an important aspect of the licensing and accreditation process in the Rich Communications Services (RCS) programme.  It allows the company undertaking the IOT process to apply for a license to use the special RCS service mark created for Rich Communications Services – enhanced (RCS-e).

This new, universal consumer facing service mark for RCS-e enables a shared universal approach to visually expressing the availability of RCS-e compliant services on an international basis, across many touch points. It indicates to a user that a device, stand-alone app or operator service offering is compliant with the RCS-e specification and has met the test criteria for network and device.

The RCS IOT and accreditation process was started by GSMA in order to improve the quality of testing, increase transparency, drive scale, minimize complexity and accelerate time-to-market (TTM) of RCS-e services.

The GSMA is undertaking this to serve an urgent market need to enable standardised RCS-e compliant services to be brought to market across the whole industry. This consistent approach will mean a high level of assurance of service delivery for users – delivering the ‘It’s just there, it just works’ philosophy inherent as part of the RCS proposition to customers.  This service mark is an important visual cue across devices and network collateral that guarantees that users can insert a SIM from any RCS-e supporting network and the accredited device will work without any problem (depending on provisioning methods).

The best way to ensure standardised RCS-e compliant services on the market was to establish the service mark compliance/certification process which is a part of the IOT process. Usual accreditation process is heavy and slow, caused by a need to provide and analyse traces for each solution that goes through the IOT process. To maximize the synergies between providers and vendors and in order to accelerate TTM, the IOT process has been designed as a self-accreditation process.

The legal basis for that self-accreditation process is covered by the License Agreement which shall be signed by GSMA and the licensee.

The license agreement is a promise to only use the service mark when the device/platform has successfully completed the accreditation minimum requirements which are provided in the license agreement and is applicable for certain device categories  (devices, PCs, tablets, etc.).

Detailed information on the licensing and accreditation processes can be found via the hyperlinks here. There are 2 types of the licensee defined by GSMA in the accreditation process:

• Operators – companies providing RCS-e services to users
• RCS-e client manufacturers – companies producing independent software for the end-user devices or embedded solutions from Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) supporting provisioning of the RCS-e services in the operator’s network

Note: The downloadable clients produced by Application developers are deemed to be of ‘RCS-e client manufactures’ type.

All licensee types are only required to sign the license agreement once.

Companies that are accredited and have commercially launched will be listed on the Accreditation webpage.