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.
Western Europe leads the way, with the first commercial deployments of RCS occurring in 2010 in France, led by Bouygues Telecom, 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, according to Infonetics.
