Competition in the mobile communications market is fierce and coming from many angles, including mobile service providers, MVNOs, over-the-top VoIP ASPs, social networking sites, Web 2.0 companies, and even from handset manufacturers, with application stores that wrest control and value from the mobile service provider. Mobile service providers face the same challenge that fixed and cable service providers have over the last few years: how to provide connectivity without becoming a dumb broadband pipe. This challenge puts incredible pressure on mobile service providers to differentiate their service offerings in order to boost, if not just stabilize, ARPU, profitability and subscriber growth.
In the face of this competitive reality, the GSM Association (GSMA) defined the Rich Communication Suite (RCS) as a new set of IP interactive communication services that can be offered over today's 3G radio networks. RCS, a GSMA-led initiative with over 60 members, comprising service providers, equipment vendors and handset/client companies, aims to seamlessly unify the communications experience by integrating traditional mobile telephony with new interactive services such as presence, instant messaging and content sharing with the mobile phone's address book as the starting point.
RCS leverages the 3GPP IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) architecture and uses SIP signaling to establish sessions and share presence. These services use the 3G IP data channel and supplement rather than attempt to replace today's circuit-switched telephony. Mobile service providers should take the RCS initiative seriously as it can serve both defensive and offensive purposes by preventing lost revenue to the horde of competitors and driving subscriber and revenue growth.
Why RCS versus a traditional walled garden service? Increasingly, the competition is the open global content garden and service providers that continue to take a walled-garden approach versus RCS will lose out. The power of Metacalfe's Law underlies RCS: The value of a network is proportional to the square of the user base. The Enhanced Address Book is a key enabler for RCS because most subscribers' address books will include contacts on different networks. Presence, IM and multimedia experience sharing must work across those service provider boundaries. With RCS, it's not just the tens of millions of subscribers on a single network that count, but the hundreds of millions and eventual billions of subscribers of the interconnected RCS environment.
There is a mix of technical and business challenges to making RCS successful. Today most mobile service providers do not have much experience with SIP-based services and will need to leverage the solutions that fixed and cable service providers have deployed to support their IP interactive communication portfolios. To succeed, service providers need to ensure that RCS services are seamlessly interoperable, high-quality and always available.
RCS services must work seamlessly across the entire delivery chain, including interoperability between IMS networks and the myriad mobile phones and RCS clients, as well as between service providers offering RCS services. While the GSMA is not defining new standards and RCS services use the established SIP signaling protocol, this does not ensure interoperability. Mediation and normalization of SIP signaling differences at the access (subscriber- to-IMS core) and interconnect border (between service providers) will be essential.
RCS services also must work across service provider boundaries to subscribers on other networks, which will change the way mobile service providers interconnect; end-to-end IP is required for RCS to work. In addition to the interoperability challenges cited above, IP interconnects also introduce challenges in the areas of security, number resolution and routing and settlement. Service providers must be able to identify the network on which the RCS subscriber resides and how to best route to the appropriate session border controller into that network.
If RCS is to be successful, the service must be always on and available while protected from service outages that could result from heavy usage or malicious attacks. Network design must aim to minimize lapses in the service availability, including capabilities such as topology hiding, DoS attack prevention and access control.
Subscriber quality of experience is also essential. Interactive communications inherently demand different treatment than 3G data applications so some RCS services will be especially sensitive to jitter, packet loss and latency —unlike Web browsing or e-mail. Resources are finite and unusually heavy usage could negatively impact the experience of all subscribers. Designing the network for handling the dynamic QoS needs of a particular service is important. Session admission control policies that look at bandwidth as well as IMS signaling resources mitigate this challenge.
On the business front, RCS is meant to drive new revenue. How to do so is an unresolved issue. There are multiple ways to drive revenue from RCS services: indirect, usage-based and all-inclusive monthly fees. The user trials by the big three French service providers should help answer some of these business model questions.
The RCS 1.0 service package was defined in 2008 and thus far, there is one publicly announced user trial featuring Bouygues Telecom, Orange and SFR slated for late 2009. While Infonetics Research projects only 1.1 million RCS subscribers by the end of 2010, RCS addresses a sizable market that is already Internet savvy and increasingly connected via social networking sites. At the close of 2008, there were 407 million 3G (HSPA and EV-DO) subscribers and Informa projects that there will be 1.8 billion WCDMA/HSPA subscribers in 2013.
RCS represents an innovative response to the evolving competitive pressures. Now, service providers must bring the right mix of technology and business savvy to surmount the challenges as they introduce RCS SIP-based interactive communication services.
Kevin Mitchell is director of Wireless Solutions Marketing for Acme Packet and can be reached at kmitchell@acmepacket.com.