rcs

Cisco Umi Interoperability
Cisco announced that it’s Home Telepresence offering – Umi, will be interoperatable with ‘Umi-Connect‘ – A umi software client for Mac and PC and Cisco’s professional Telepresence systems.
This announcement puts Umi in a whole different perspective, as Umi can now be used for business purposes, i.e – home workers.
In addition, Cisco revelaed a new 720P only version, for a cheaper $399 price and lowered the monthly fee (for a yearly plan) to 9.95$ a month from 24.99$ a month.
Lack of interoperability and high ownership cost were major points of criticism when Cisco introduce Umi and it remains to be seen how this latest move will improve Umi acceptance in home and SOHO markets.

3G4G blog posted a short article about RCS (or in it’s latest form – RCS-e)
The article gives a good overview of what RCS is, and is a recommended read. Back in July 2010 we interviewed Jose M.Recio from Solaimes about RCS and it’s relevancy in the age of the smartphone – As it seems, it’s still is.

Panasonic Viera Blu-ray players to include Skype
Panasonic announced Skype support for it’s new blu-ray player line (2011). Video-Chat will be supported via the Freetalk Conference Camera, which will cost 99$ and be available starting this month.

Spectrume Reform Legistlation
US Senators Olympia Snowe and John Kerry recently introduced the Reforming Airwaves by Developing Incentives and Opportunistic Sharing (RADIOS) Act. The proposed RADIOS Act aims to provide FCC and NTIA detailed information needed for smarter allocation of the Radio spectrum.

LTE sprint
Spirt is one of the few operators in USA that use CDMA for voice and data connectivity – Steve Elfman, Sprint’s president of network operations said that the company will make a decision regarding LTE in mid-year, however if Sprint does decide to use LTE it could be deployed by year-end 2013.

We have asked Jose M.Recio from Solaiemes to talk about RCS and to shed some more light about his IMTC 2025 presentation (Jose participated in the Triple Play Session and presented RCS examples).

Solaiemes creates communication solutions built upon the RCS features of the IMS standards.

RCS (Rich Communcation Suite) is an industy effort driven by a group of operators, infrastructure and device vendors – Orange, Telecom Italia, Telefonica, TeliaSonera, Ericsson, Nokia Siemens networks, Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Samsung, etc.

The main RCS features are -

Enchaned Phonebook, Messenging and Calls – Sharing of multimedia content, chat and presence that works across devices and operators.

I’ve asked Jose to talk a bit about RCS and his view on the mobile market:

Hi Jose, can you share your thoughts about RCS and how your what your company does in that field?

Jose: RCS, short for RichCommunicationSuite, it is a coordinated effort, driven by GSMA (the mobile industry association) and backed by the major players to develop a common set of “beyond-SMS-and-voice” basic enablers that are available out of the box in mobile, and work seamlessly across carriers and are also accessible from a PC/broadband client.

Think messaging, video-sharing, etc. available even in cheap handsets, preinstalled and working across carriers. One single use case for doing zillions of things.

Isn’t these features available on many smart-phones?

Jose: Yes, that’s true. But that there are billions of users that are using feature, cheap, phones.

Besides, carrier services are a bit more trusted, especially by businesses.

Being able to choose – would you develop a service that billions can use or an app that only the owners of a given handset running a given software version can access?

And what would be a good example of an application available to all? SMS!

If a user just knows how to send a SMS, he knows how to access millions of “applications”: insult politicians in TV, receive credit cards alerts, buy ringtones, and of course send a SMS to his loved one. RCS is meant just for that – to create the future mobile applications to be used across all devices – If done properly, RCS allows developers to go beyond SMS, with a richer experience. Many business cases will be discovered. Just leave the ecosystem time to develop.

Are there any devices that support RCS today?

Jose: The “traditional” Telco ecosystem is fully committed on paper to RCS. Devices: NSN, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, LG… there are Android and prototype iPhone clients. There is also an IOT event per quarter to test interoperability.

For the first time All 3 operators in France, Telefonica and Orange in Spain and all operators in Korea – They all work together in coordinated launches.

Are there any RCS applications currently available or in Beta?

Jose: That’s where solaiemes is focused: Createing APIs so the innovation powerhouse out there in the net can use RCS for things we can’t even think of. That’s exactly what I presented in the IMTC 2025 presentation – How do you put triple play services in a device/screen where you can’t easily deploy a full software client? My IMTC presentation contains test cases (http://solaiemes.com/index.php?id=94)

Today, some of the features of mobile devices aren’t inter-operable – 3G video calls and iPhone Facetime – Will RCS applications will be interoperable with high end smartphone applications?

Jose: That’s exactly the point, Many Services do not make sense any more from person-to-person. However they make a lot of sense when you introduce a business process or an application: SMS and video calls are very good examples.

The RCS applications that we see as successful would be the ones linked to business apps or cloud-based/community-based use cases.

Check for example the Twitter example in the previous Link – a user may have a native full twitter client (on high end smartphone, or a PC) or a RCS app (feature/simple devices) – Twitter will be the same for both.

SMS success for consumers and carriers (main source of data revenues) is based on ubiquitous presence of the basic enabler (every mobile phone supports SMS) and common use experience and use case. It doesn’t matter if you send or receive a SMS for voting in a TV program, buy a ringtone, get a notification of a credit card transaction, ect. It’s all the same.

On summery – Carries can either look for the SMS way: Common basic experience, based on a Telco enabler (RCS?), for many services. Or for the App way – try to grab one of the “must have” future few applications.

Based on what happened so far, it seems more reasonable to go for the first one – Carrier intermediating third parties offering services over the enabler.

Industry News – Umi Interop, RCS-e, Skype & Panasonic and more

Is there a place for Rich Communication Suite in the mobile future?

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