BuddeBlog

Infonetics Research in their new report ‘Rich Communications Suite Services, Devices and Subscribers’ state Rich Communication Suite (RCS) aims to unify the communications experience by tying together presence, voice, chat, and multimedia services over IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) networks, first for mobile networks and later extending to fixed-line capabilities. 

Further as commercial launches of Rich Communication Suite services begin in 2010, positive progress is being made in achieving interoperability among operators. Western Europe leads the way, with the first commercial deployments of RCS occurring in 2010 in France, led by Bouygues Télécom, Orange, and SFR. Asia Pacific also will see pockets of RCS commercial trials and deployments in 2010, starting in Japan and South Korea. 

The lack of RCS-compliant handsets has been a critical barrier and there is work to be done toward operators launching additional enhanced applications and services over RCS. When and if these challenges are overcome, service providers that offer RCS services will be able to tap into new and increased revenue streams as their subscribers ramp up their voice, data, and messaging usage. 

Report highlights:

• With mobile subscriber penetration levels maxing out in many regions, mobile operators are turning to value-added services and applications, particularly mobile broadband, to increase revenue; RCS reflects this drive
• By 2011, the second full year of commercial RCS availability, Infonetics forecasts there will be 7.3 million RCS subscribers, mostly in Western Europe and Asia Pacific, with a small but growing number in North America
• RCS subscriber growth is expected to ramp at explosive triple-digit percentages annually through 2014 as RCS becomes widely available on 3G devices and more mobile operators achieve interoperability
• The core features of RCS include enriched calling (sharing videos, images, and other multimedia during a voice call), enhanced messaging (e.g., multimedia, chat, and file transfer messaging), and the enhanced phonebook, which adds service capabilities to the mobile phone network address book
• The network address book will play a pivotal role in the success of RCS; future capabilities such as auto-populating from diverse sources (LinkedIn, Facebook, MS Outlook, etc.) will enable increased communications across multiple media 

For more info see: www.infonetics.com 

This entry was posted on Monday, March 15th, 2010 at 10:00 am and is filed under News & Views. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.