Today, a group of key operators, infrastucture and device vendors comprised of Orange, Telecom Italia, Telefónica, TeliaSonera, Ericsson, Nokia Siemens Networks, Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Samsung, announced a joint effort to facilitate the evolution of mobile communication towards rich communication.

Together the participants have agreed upon a set of features originating from profiled IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) standards as well as implementation guidelines with the intention of having interoperable rich communication services available in 2008.

Consumers are now experiencing the power and the promise of converged and rich communication such as instant messaging, video sharing and buddy lists, which have introduced a new user experience.
Consumers expect that these capabilities are available on any type of devices and that there is open communication between devices and networks. With the Rich Communication Suite (RCS) these customer expectations can be fulfilled, and ever evolving services can be offered to enhance users’ experience. The core feature set of RCS includes the following services:

•    Enhanced Phonebook, with service capabilities and presence enhanced contacts information
•    Enhanced Messaging, which enables a large variety of messaging options including chat and messaging history
•    Enriched Call, which enables multimedia content sharing during a voice call

The RCS Initiative is the joint effort of leading industry players to speed up and facilitate the adoption of applications and services that provide an interoperable, convergent, rich communication experience.