Rich Communications – the story so far
The story so far
The Rich Communication Suite (RCS) industry initiative was formed by a group of leading industry players in 2007. In February 2008 the GSMA officially became the project ‘home’ of RCS and an RCS Steering Committee was established by the organisation.
The scope of the RCS Steering Committee’s work was to entail the definition, testing and integration of the diverse services in the application suite known as RCS.Some three years later, the RCS project released a new specification – RCS-e (e = ‘enhanced’) as well as the various iterations of the original RCS specifications and the programme is now called Rich Communication Services.
Creating the RCS specification
Four releases of the RCS specification have been made to date. Each release expanded the scope of its predecessor and, through Interoperability Testing (IOT), the functionality of devices and networks have been tested.
Release 1 –
offered the first definitions for the enrichment of voice and chat with content sharing, driven from an RCS enhanced address book.
Release 2 –
added broadband access to RCS features: enhancing the messaging and enabling sharing of files.
Release 3 –
focussed on the broadband device as a primary device.
Release 4 –
the most recent release, this included support for LTE.
RCS-e was initiated in May 2011 for the rapid commercialisation of services into the marketplace. Public launches of RCS-e services are planned for Q4 2011.
Both RCS-e and RCS are supported by the mobile operator community. Specifications are available
here.
