The GSMA's new technology could herald a comms revolution, says Acision's Dave Spann.
The nature of human communications has changed over the past decade. We tweet our peers, use LinkedIn instead of business cards and share pictures on Facebook instead of labouring over carefully-arranged photo albums.
Our social life is increasingly migrating online: we are always connected and everything is now.
This increase in expectations, coupled with constantly improving technology, has spawned a generation of ‘Digital Natives.’ For this group, it is no longer enough to just be connected via a smartphone – they need to be connected across a range of devices – appliances, e-readers, TV and cameras.
Of course, there's disruption in an ever-more connected, service specific world, which threatens to cannibalise more conventional services such as SMS and MMS.
To survive, operators need to embrace new revenue generation products born out of the customer’s desire for richer communications services.
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This is the aim of the GSMA’s RCS-e (e for enhanced) project. This collaborative effort on the part of operators, handset makers, infrastructure vendors and applications developers aims to give end-users new services, while helping the industry to deploy them.
Specifically, RCS-e is an enriched comms service based on three central features: enhanced address book, rich calling for video and file sharing and rich messaging for IM. These will all be available in real-time, pre-installed on devices and accessible through the address book application.
Deutsche Telekom, Orange-FT, Telecom Italia, Telefonica and Vodafone have already announced plans to launch RCS-e in late 2011/ early 2012.
RCS-e has the potential to transform the way we communicate. SMS, IM, Skype and e-mail already let users choose a messaging option based on urgency and delivery parameters.
RCS-e can alter these parameters. For example, an enhanced address book that shows a contact's presence and status leaves users free to contact others in a medium which suits them, regardless of access method or network type.
As well as this enhanced address book, RCS-e allows subscribers to send video or images while on an active call, enabling participants to share experiences.
Enhanced messaging will facilitate conversational threading where all the messages be it chat, MMS or SMS will be shown together grouped by who the user interacted with in time order, with group distribution capabilities and multi-device communications.
This is particularly relevant for the ‘Digital Native’ who switches between a tablet, smartphone, laptop and PC. With RCS-e, messaging and sharing sessions could potentially be accessed from any device.
With RCS-e, operators will be able to leverage their brand and network to offer a compelling service, while the subscriber will benefit from a more social-focused, sharing-based experience.
Acision believes that interoperability and transparency are key ingredients to ensure mass-market adoption of any communication service and RCS-e fits this bill.
With these in place, RCS-e will be the next step in the evolution in human communication.
* Dave Spann is the VP of technology at Acision
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