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Yesterday, we had a conversation with a European carrier, who explained to us that the obstacle for them implementing RCS, was the upfront capital cost to purchase an RCS Instant Messaging Application Server and an XDMS.

For some time, it’s been thought that deployment of RCS-e has a number of barriers – IMS being the main one.  Clearly up-front cost is another barrier. Anticipating these barriers, we have come up with a solution that provides an operator with an RCS-e deployment that can be offered by leveraging a hosted offer.

As word spreads that NewPace has an RCS-e solution that doesn’t require an IMS core we are frequently running in to the question of how our service operates.  The IMS vendors have done a great job of convincing everyone the only way you can run a SIP application on a mobile network is inside their infrastructure.   SIP is an IP protocol, just like HTTP, SMTP, POP etc., all of which run now in mobile networks without IMS components.

The announcement on Friday that Vodafone, Telefonica and Orange will be launching RCS-e in the first half of 2012 is most certainly a signal to the rest of the carrier community that after all the talk, five RCS technical specifications, and contentious debates, RCS is finally happening and gaining momentum. 

Some may are argue that this is just a political exercise to defend a poorly conceived technology with no future and that we have seen the announcements before.  This time I choose to I believe it’s finally real.

One of the most common concerns I have heard about RCS is that an IMS deployment is a pre-requisite. This idea creates barriers as, while IMS deployment is an inevitability for any operator moving to LTE, there are still many who haven’t moved to adopt an IMS core. This isn’t surprising, as adopting and deploying IMS is both a major strategic decision and a significant financial investment.