Communication without barriers: Leveraging the Rich Communication Suite
Your girlfriend always has a mobile phone close by. Your best friends twitter and poke all the time. Your boss likes IM, and your mother only wants to talk on the phone while your brother wants you to use the latest application he has just developed.
How can we leverage the wealth of communication modes available to us? …So our communications experience is significantly enriched and not impeded by competing choices?
At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, CTIA in Las Vegas and Broadband World Forum in Paris in 2009, Alcatel-Lucent successfully demonstrated how to enrich consumer communication services with a single unified address book - one that’s accessible through mobile phones, operator web portals, social networks and personalized Web 2.0 pages.
What is the GSMA Rich Communication Suite Program?
The GSMA Rich Communication Suite (RCS) Program is the leading industry initiative comprising service providers and vendors (network, device and client). Members pursue one goal: bringing rich communication services to market. Among other things, the program profiles existing standards, tests device and network interoperability as well as service provider interworking. One key aspect of RCS is that the members continuously work together to define and introduce interoperable features for the market.
What are the RCS features?
The GSMA RCS program also offers a feature-rich portfolio of services to unleash the social power of communities hidden in users’ phone books. To do this, RCS R1 offers an exciting range of features, including:
Enhanced Address Book - provides presence and capability indications, enabling users to initiate communications such as voice calls, video calls, file transfers or messaging, while integrating multimedia elements, including photos of contacts
Enriched Call - lets users exchange different types of content, such as video or photos, during a call.
Enriched Messaging - expands on traditional instant messaging to simplify and unify multiple messaging media while providing a richer user experience.
Released in July 2009, RCS R2 extends these features to broadband devices in addition to 3G mobiles. The net result is a multi-device environment for end users. For the first time ever, this enables a truly standard converged communication service. Now, a community of more than four billion users can easily communicate, and mutually enrich members’ lives.
What’s more, additional RCS features will be offered in the next releases in order to take the enriched consumer communication experience beyond mobile phones and open it up to third-party developers.
Bouygues Telecom has selected the Alcatel-Lucent RCS solution to offer mobile subscribers an anywhere, anytime communications experience over any device. Indeed, the Alcatel-Lucent RCS solution has been selected by more than 15 customers worldwide.
How is Alcatel-Lucent involved in the Rich Communication Suite Program?
As an industry leader, Alcatel-Lucent is fully committed to the RCS Program.
Alcatel-Lucent participates in all of the program’s groups on technology and business value, and occupies the chairperson
position for several of these groups.
Alcatel-Lucent hosted the first GSMA RCS plenary meeting in August 2008 and will host the plenary meeting in December 2009.
Alcatel-Lucent co-hosted the GSMA RCS testfest in Paris in January 2009 with GSMA members such as Orange/FT and SFR.
Alcatel-Lucent is actively participating in the French trial with a very strong presence in all three service providers.
Alcatel-Lucent will host the first GSMA RCS testfest of 2010, focusing on the interworking between PCs and mobiles among different service providers’ networks.
“We understand the importance of rich communication services over mobile broadband as well as fixed networks,” says Gani Nayak, President of Rich Communications activities. “We are working closely with the GSMA RCS program to define the next releases of RCS and to drive RCS to the mass market.”
How does Alcatel-Lucent help service providers enhance their position in the Web 2.0 value-chain?
Alcatel-Lucent is a leader in the business transformation to new Web 2.0 business models. Alcatel-Lucent enhances the consumer experience across any device, enabling users to share their lives, and to create new content and applications by effectively leveraging network assets. Anchored by a strategy of Applications Enablement, Alcatel-Lucent securely
opens up customer networks to third-party developers in order to provide a rich, trusted and stable Web experience, while ensuring network QoS, optimization and reduced OPEX.
Alcatel-Lucent and NTT DOCOMO, along with four other companies, have collaborated to set up a network system to jointly develop value-added network functions such as on-the-fly pictures editing or message translation.
This is why Alcatel-Lucent views the recently announced RCS DevChallenge announced by the GSMA as a very interesting initiative.
“We are excited to sponsor the RCS DevChallenge, which will speed up the introduction of new, differentiated and personalized applications that service providers can deliver to their subscribers and enhance their position in the Web 2.0 value chain”, says Gani Nayak.
Alcatel-Lucent has been working with many RCS clients’ vendors for both PCs and mobiles to ensure not only interoperability but also to unleash the world of innovation beyond any particular device.
Gani Nayak explains Alcatel-Lucent’s support of RCS (panel discussion during the GSMA RCS Live seminar at Mobile World Congress 2009)
Thibaut Brière, Marketing Manager for Communication Services, talks about Alcatel-Lucent Enriching IP Communication.
What is the Alcatel-Lucent approach to consumer communication leveraging RCS?
The consumer communication experience is changing dramatically. We have more choices for contacting family, friends and colleagues; even so, it is becoming increasingly difficult to contact them because of siloed communication access and services.
“To integrate silo communication access and services into a truly seamless communications experience for consumers, Alcatel-Lucent has leveraged RCS services on mobile phones today and continues to extend these services into service providers’ portals, social networks and other Web 2.0 sites,” says Julien Tessot, Director of Product Management from the Rich Communications activities. “We also offer capabilities to enable our customers to create and integrate differentiated services based on RCS services, and execute these services together in the same environment ensuring high performance while maintaining low OPEX.”
Alcatel-Lucent joined the Rich Communication Suite (RCS) initiative in April 2008. The RCS program was formally integrated under GSMA in August 2008. Since then, Alcatel-Lucent has been actively leading and contributing to the RCS program to help drive rich communication services to the market.
At CTIA Wireless 2009 in Las Vegas, Alcatel-Lucent also announced the launch of its Rich Communications Manager. The Manager
delivers unified rich messaging and communications through a single web portal to leverage the RCS network address book shared with
mobiles. More info
