Rich Communication Suite

Rich Communication Suite

The Rich Communication Services programme is a global initiative to deploy inter-operator services within an industry ecosystem. Created by the GSM Association (GSMA), Rich Communication Services are designed to offer richer yet simpler communication services supported by a strong ecosystem and a variety of architecture implementation options.

Marketed by the GSMA under the brand name joyn™, RCS is an upgrade that marks the transition of messaging and voice capabilities from Circuit Switched technology to an all-IP world. RCS and Voice over Long Term Evolution (VoLTE) share the same IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) investment and leverage the same IMS capabilities. Wider and large scale IMS deployment, interoperability between different terminal vendor RCS clients and RCS service interworking between operators are the key aims of the RCS Initiative.

For consumers, it has the potential to combine voice and SMS with instant messaging or chat, live video sharing and file transfer across all devices and networks.

Main features of RCS are:

• Enhanced Phonebook: service capabilities and enhanced contacts information such as presence and service discovery.
• Enhanced Messaging: enables a large variety of messaging options including chat, emoticons, location share and file sharing.
• Enriched Calls: enables multimedia content sharing during a voice call, video call and video sharing (see what I see)

The service was launched free of charge, but will be a paid service in the future.

It is more limited than its competitors, because it is only available to some telecommunications carriers.