Rich Communication Suite

Rich Communication Suite (RCS) is an industry effort focused on the use of IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) for providing mobile phone communication services. "Rich Communication" in itself is meaningless jargon, which refers to the use of more than just voice for communication, but has long been touted as a benefit of IMS. It is to be noted that much of the capability of RCS is already available from Internet service providers.

According to the press release, from the end-user point of view RCS would enable communication such as instant messaging, video sharing and buddy lists. These capabilities would be available on any type of devices using an open communication between devices and networks. Main features of RCS are:

• Enhanced Phonebook, with service capabilities and presence enhanced contacts information
• Enhanced Messaging, which enables a large variety of messaging options including chat and messaging history
• Enriched Call, which enables multimedia content sharing during a voice call. For many years Nokia and Ericsson have been pushing a "see what I see" capability, but this has failed to be taken up by operators, or the way it was deployed failed to result in great take-up by consumers. Bundling this feature with the two other features may help to increase uptake.

Wider and large scale IMS deployment, Interoperability between different terminal vendor RCS clients and RCS service interworking between operators are the key aims of RCS Initiative.

Technical features

RCS leverages the various existing standards, thus RCS takes on board different services defined by e.g. 3GPP and Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) and combines them with the Enhanced Phonebook. This allows the service capabilities as well as presence information of the different recipients to be shown in the terminal phonebook application.

RCS reuses the capabilities of 3GPP specified IMS core system as the underlying service platform taking care of issues such as authentication, authorization, registration, charging and routing.

The core feature set of RCS includes:

• Enhanced Phonebook, with service capabilities and presence enhanced contacts information
• Enhanced Messaging, which enables a large variety of messaging options including chat and messaging history
• Enriched Call, which enables multimedia content sharing during a voice call.

The following standardized services are a part of RCS concept:

• Presence
• Voice call
• Instant messaging
• Video share
• Image share
• SMS
• MMS

Status

According to Nokia, by February 2008 the RCS Initiative has defined a core feature set, developed reference implementations of the services and conducted interoperability testing in multi-vendor environment. The intention was to have interoperable rich communication services available in 2008. Current aim is that the first interoperable RCS services are set to be launched in mid 2009.

RCS Initiative demonstrated interoperability of the prototype RCS compatible terminals at the Barcelona 3GSM exhibition 2008. RCS Initiative also announced a RCS prototype interoperability demo at IMS World Forum 2008 in Paris.

GSMA press release tells RCS integration testing takes place in Helsinki at the end of September 2008 hosted by TeliaSonera with a full update on the progress of initiative in Mobile Asia Congress during November.

As of 15 September the RCS initiative is moved to a GSMA work program. The GSMA RCS work program contains further details.

In January 2009, the first multi-operator trial took place using multiple core IMS vendors along with clients and devices. Subsequent to that event, the 3 major French mobile operators, Bouygues Telecom, Orange, and SFR announced intentions to offer a user trial in the second half over 2009. At Mobile World Congress 2009, there were live demonstrations and many RCS member booths featured information on RCS service components^{[citation needed]}. However, as of September 2010 none of these operators have commercially deployed RCS.

SK Telecom launched an RCS service called HD Video Call in South Korea in November 2010, and demonstrated it at Mobile World Congress 2011. As well as allowing users to share video, the HD Video Call service also supports sharing photos and sketches over an RCS-based service.

Note that membership of the RCS initiative does not imply that a company is planning significant launch.

In March 2011, Metaswitch launched the Thrutu service that has been described as 'RCS-lite', allowing the sharing features of RCS without the infrastructure.

In Germany the three leading operators T-Mobile, Vodafone Germany, and Telefónica Germany want to launch RCS-e in the beginning 2012 although they wanted to launch it already at the End of 2011.