what is RCS/RCS-e

IMS/SIP - RCS/RCS-e                                   Home : www.sharetechnote.com

RCS/RCS-e   As more and more people gets interested in IMS more than the simple SMS, I am hearing more and more about RCS. RCS stands for 'Rich Communication Service'. You will find quite a lot of material by googling it, but it would be hard to get a 'short/tangible' understanding of what it really is. Is RCS a kind of specification ? Is it a kind of software package ? Is it a kind of name for a technology ?   Confused !!!...   Whenevery you get confused by anything when you try to catching up the new technology/words, one of the best way would be to refer to any person/document from which/who the word/technology is orignated.   It seems that the origination of RCS/RCS-e comes from GSMA. So I decided to dig things from GSMA.   A simple/clear definition of RCS/RCS-e from http://www.gsma.com/rcs-faqs/     RCS (Generic Term) = the generic term used to describe “Rich Communication Services” RCS (Special Term) = Project name for the GSMA’s promotion of rich communications among MNOs (Rich Communications Services). RCS-e = Technical spec name for the preferred methods of providing first stage interoperability among MNOs (Rich Communication Services – enhanced). RCS-e is the latest version of Rich Communication Suite (RCS) which will enable mobile phone end users to use instant messaging (IM), live video sharing and file transfer across any device on any network operator   Another good definition of RCS can be found at Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Suite) as follows. RCS initiative is an industry effort focused on the use of 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.   If you want some intuitive 'feeling' about this, go to http://www.youtube.com/user/RCSChannel   As is described above, RCS initiative is a "joint efffort in the industry". It implies that many stakeholders in the industry (both Network Operators and UE manufacturer) should join in the effort and come out with some 'agreed rule (specification)' and implement them according to the specification. I don't know exactly how many Network Operators and UE makers are participating in this joint effort, but seems that there would be over 80 companies (Network Operators + UE Maker).   There are very wide spectrum of technicalogies specified in the RCS, but a couple of Core technology that almost everybody talks about RCS are as follows.   i) Enhanced Phonebook : This phone book give you not only simple phone numbers but also presence information and service capability. With these information, you can initiate the communication by selecting one of the available communication types. You can use the Presence information  to communicate any personalized contact features including photo, availability and free text ii) Enhanced Messaging : This enables a large variety of messaging options like SMS, MMS, Instant Messaging and buddy related communication history. iii) Enriched Call : This enables multimedia contents sharing during the voice call. (e.g, video share, image share and file transfer)   You can find the detailed Technical Specification of RCS-e from http://www.gsma.com/rcs-product-specifications-rcs-e-specifications/ If you are interested specifically on how to test these features, please refer to the test specification at GSMA site. RCE IOT001 RCS-e Test Cases.