At Mobile World Congress the new RCS Specification 5.3 specification has now been officially approved by the PSMC and published by the RCS GSG group.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The importance and main focus of this new specification release has been around convergence and reducing optionality. The drive behind this focus has been to reduce industry fragmentation with an intention of having more focused and aligned devices and networks in the future for RCS. This focus will help RCS scale and interconnect in the future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The main areas of convergence that has been achieved in this release is reducing deployment options in 1-to-1 and Group Chat, removing options for Geolocation Pull and restricting scenarios for best effort voice calling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In addition to the convergence work there has also been progress in the following areas:
\u2022 Refining the Common Message Store by improving the definition for storage of xMS messages and better handling for marking messages as seen or deleted. These changes will help improve the customers experience when using RCS devices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u2022 Improved security: SIM-based authentication for access to the Message Store, configuration server and File Transfer content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u2022 Creating a more generic configuration: The previous RCS specific configuration mechanism has been split off to separate documents to allow it to be used for other services, for example VoLTE, to adopt the mechanism which will allow for better co-existence with other IP Communication services.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u2022 General maintenance of the specification has been performed to debug the specification, this follows from lessons learnt and issues found in live networks from operators that are actively deploying RCS. This will help to improve the service as a whole.<\/p>\n\n\n\n