There’s been a lot of talk about RCS lately as more carriers are starting to adapt the universal profile that was recently announced by the GSMA. We’ve seen carriers like T-Mobile and Sprint begin to support it, and there was even a demo recently that showed AT&T was working on it as well. Then there are other mobile carriers (Verizon Wireless) who have not announced any support for the universal profile at all. Although this could change in the future, right now there are some players in the field who wish to stay away from RCS until its roll-out is in a later stage.
On the other hand, we have companies like Google who have a vested interest in promoting this new technology and who are helping these carriers add support for RCS as quickly as possible. Google has been at this for a while, but now Samsung has announced a plan to promote RCS as well. Back in November of last year, Samsung acquired a company named NewNet for their RCS technology. At the time, we knew they purchased the company because of the work they were doing on RCS, but we didn’t know their full plans.
Yesterday, Samsung made their plans officially known and it looks like it could help a number of mobile carriers who adopt it. While it is different on a technical level to other RCS clouds, it is using the same RCS Universal Profile. Samsung will have to work with Google to get them working together. This isn’t a matter of if they will work together, it’s just a matter of when. Samsung says their new RCS hub will “support and simplify the interconnectivity among other RCS-enabled operators, Samsung and third-party RCS clouds.”
Samsung is wanting to help mobile carriers deploy this technology and they’re willing to help offset the cost of it too. A mobile carrier who chooses Samsung’s RCS cloud will be able to avoid the costly and time-consuming efforts of building their own network infrastructure.
Source: Samsung