The RCS fever is reaching Google

There have been plenty of articles written trying to speculate why Google is diving into RCS (which they announced at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona), and why it acquired Jibe, a company that had developed an RCS client and cloud solution. In this writing, I will try to address the acronyms and the feasibility of RCS with or without Google.

 A little bit of background … RCS (Rich Communication Suite) is a group of features put together under one umbrella having started a couple of years before the Androids and the iPhones when the mobile industry was trying to evolve messaging and real time communication services. While the mission had legs, the problem was that the folks that got together to “standardize” it did not introduce anything new but tried to glue features, full services and technologies together. They agreed to build on IMS/SIP as the core technology (which at the time was a technology trying to find a business case) but also to make use of other clunky standards specified under the OMA (Open Mobile Alliance) umbrella such as Presence and IM based on XDMS/XCAP. When GSMA took over the work, the RCS feature set was: 1-to-1 chat, group chat, file transfer, content sharing, (social) presence and capability discovery, IP based voice, etc.  As you can easily imagine, when you put a group of people together to build such a broad acronym they continued to add to or enhance this suite of features. The first clients ended up implementing subsets of the specification because mobile phone platforms at that stage were the likes of Nokia, Ericsson, Samsung and only one smart platform - Symbian.  Later, Android allowed easier client development but this did not stop fragmentation of RCS.

The European carriers understood that they won’t be able to interoperate and decided to freeze a subset of features and brand it “Joyn”. This is how the “RCS profile” was born. Some of the Vodafone, T-Mobile (Europe) and Telefonica operators launched Joyn clients on several phones but the availability was so scarce and the experience so poor that users ended up not using it. The Europeans reached up to the North American operators in order to expand the reach of RCS. ATT and Verizon joined the effort but wanted to add even more services and to modify some fundamentals; therefore, they started more work on the standard under GSMA. At the time (2013), RCS was already through several versions: 1.2.x, 2.0.x, 3.0.x etc. It now became RCS 5.1 and added video calling, geolocation exchange, (user) “is typing” and many other small features.  In the meantime, the European effort started to streamline RCS releases adding to the Joyn profile:  Joyn Hot Fixes, Joyn Blackbird Drop 1, Joyn Blackbird Drop 2, Crane … each one trying to lock a defined set of features and versions.

Each one of these versions brought a lot of CRs (change requests) and bug fixes and further fragmented each version of RCS. There are such things like RCS5.1 version x.x.x and all these versions continue to evolve separately. Consider also that these features would be implemented with technologies defined by 3GPP, IETF, etc., which have versions and releases of their own.

 To conclude, if one would want to implement an RCS client or back-end … which version should one implement against? Secondly, how would RCS clients built by different software companies interoperate? These are simple questions for which the people and the organizations that continue to “standardize” RCS know the answer but I believe they don’t spell it out.

The above is the history of RCS fragmentation, however, the biggest problem of RCS is inter-carrier interoperability.  Because of this problem, in my opinion RCS was born dead. In order for any flavor of RCS to interoperate between operators, an IMS interoperability must be in place. There is no such thing today. VoLTE is based on IMS. How many VoLTE interoperability implementations have you seen?  We will slowly see some VoLTE interoperability announcements this year (don’t get too excited... 2-3 maybe).  But with VoLTE having barely been launched by the big operators, the next step will be to enable roaming for it which will bring with it another cluster of problems. RCS will get de-prioritized.

 In 2013, I tried to talk the USA operators into launching only ONE new service (based on IMS) but to do it together and in one version – video calling. The proposition was simple: replicate the SMS experience – simple, consistent, cross carrier. We (the operators) ended up crafting an interoperability guideline under the CTIA umbrella but shortly thereafter this got thrown under the RCS 5.1.  And it is still there!

How hard is it to do a WhatsApp, Skype or Facebook chat from an AT&T phone to a China Mobile phone? Does it need to establish inter-carrier interoperability? Does it need to link the 2 carriers together at the IP or even physical layer? Do both phones have to run the same version of Android or iOS?

 Now Google comes in and announces the “universal RCS profile”. Maybe this is the magical profile and all carriers will have an “aha” moment and align. But hold on, AT&T, Verizon are not on it plus T-Mobile launched a Samsung-only version that is guaranteed to have issues with the “universal profile”. Also, the operators still have to implement IMS first. With or without the help of the Google/Jibe RCS cloud there are massive complications. Vodafone already has that paradigm with Joyn in one IMS stack against a centralized IMS core and VoLTE running with a separate stack against a de-centralized IMS core.  How do you then upgrade an RCS voice call to an IR.94 video call in the future?

I was thinking that maybe Google wants to keep the mobile carriers busy with RCS while they ramp up running the voice service for them but I dismissed this idea because Google does not do evil.

 Referring to the RCS initiative, Google’s Nick Fox, VP of communications products at Google, states: “Today marks an important step forward in bringing a better messaging experience for Android users everywhere, and we’re thrilled to collaborate with our partners across the industry to make this happen.”

I don’t think Android users are missing a good messaging experience. Android is missing a consistent framework for SIP services which could open the door for service interoperability with experiences enabled by Skype and iMessage/FaceTime. Carriers can push that interoperability as a charter if they care about the user experience. Users would love to use enhanced communication services but cross platforms and cross carriers. The RCS road is a road that goes nowhere in my opinion. This is why Facebook is winning.