RCS: The Next Generation SMS?

Last February 2016, the GSM Association (GSMA), the global organization of telecommunications providers, along with several of its members, including our own Globe Telecoms and Smart Communications, joined Google to expand efforts to deploy Rich Communications Services (RCS), a messaging service that is supposed to replace the aging Short Message Service (SMS) and Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS). This initiative will promote an open, consistent and globally interoperable messaging system using Google’s Android platform.

What is RCS?

Rich Communications Services (RCS) is the platform that enables delivery of communication experiences beyond voice and SMS — GSMA

Unlike SMS, which rides on the old circuit-switched network, RCS runs on an all IP network. It is not unlike the messaging apps that we are all familiar with today, such as WhatsApp, Viber, Line, Telegram, Facebook Messenger, Google Hangout, Apple’s iMessage, to name a few of the popular ones. RCS allows you to send text ala SMS, images and photos, audio, and video. It even allows you to have audio and video conferencing!

What sets RCS apart from all of these messaging platforms is simple — the telcos have no play on these platforms, except provide the dumb pipe to carry the packets, the messages. In a nutshell, RCS is the telcos’ attempt to take part of the whole messaging pie — and hopefully regain the revenues that they once enjoyed with SMS.

What is Google’s take on this? Google is on the same boat as the telcos. It does not have a messaging platform that boasts of the same number of users as those above. It tried with Google Hangout — integrating its own messaging services with SMS, but that failed. Heck, the experience was far from pleasant, which made me install a third-party SMS client to separate SMS from non-SMS Hangout messages. Contrast this to Apple’s iMessage, which provides a more seamless integration of SMS and rich media messaging. Unfortunately, Apple’s iMessage is limited to SMS for cross-platform interoperability, i.e., you won’t be able to send audio, photo or video to non-iOS devices.

RCS has been out since 2012, of which only a few GSMA members committed to deploy it. Now with Google’s involvement and with more than 85% of the smartphones in circulation today running on the Android platform, RCS might get the much needed boost. However, if competitors, such as Microsoft and Apple, don’t support it out of the box, RCS will just be another MMS, promising, but dead.

In a nutshell, Google and the telcos are missing out in the messaging market, and they are hoping that RCS will get them in the game.