Get by the GSMA pavilion if you are interested in the latest developments in what handset manufacturers, operators and developers are achieving within RCS.
The Joyn demonstrations from KT, Metro, Vodafone, Orange and Telefonica are a world away from those somewhat scratchy RCS demos of two years ago. These are (mostly) embedded clients showing slick in-call video, file sharing and group chat between devices, and across different live networks.
I saw two developers, NeuSoft and Summit Tech show the benefits of RCS API integration for very different purposes. Summit Tech was showing how live medical information could be transmitted in-call in a remote consultation between doctor and patient. NeuSoft had designed an app that provided parental or carer controls for a phone so that the phone could very simply call only “Mum” or “Dad” and support messaging between just those contacs. The developers used the RCS API to provide web integration of the service to enable service controls within the app.
There was also a game developer who had used the API to allow in-game video sharing so that one gamer could see on screen another gamer. That was achieved, I was told, with one line of code.
Vodafone is using its service platform in Spain as a hosted service provider for its Joyn deployment in Germany.
What does this have to do with mobile networks? Well, it’s worth noting that operators are coming to market without full IMS implementations in their networks, using cloud or hosted versions of IMS solutions to enable them to deploy rich messaging services. That means that capex can be reduced to a bare minimum, and operational expenditure in the network scaled to growth.
Graham Trickey, Technical Director, GSMA, said that there are now 69 total commitments to deploying Joyn, with 19 vendors signed up to the GSMA’s call for cloud-based iterations of the service capability. Operators can also leverage a hosted model internally across the group. Vodafone is using its service platform in Spain as a hosted service provider for its Joyn deployment in Germany, for instance.
Well worth a look.
