Is RCS Viable for Smaller Mobile Operators?

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.

Even still some think that the associated expense may be too much for a smaller carrier or mobile operator to contemplate. Some think that it’s really a service to be offered by the larger operators, at least in the near-term.

That’s definitely not the case. Since an RCS-e offer can scale according to the number of deployed licenses, the costs are tied to the number of users. There doesn’t have to be a significant upfront or fixed cost either.

The size of the carrier doesn’t come into it and neither does the size of the initial deployment. Everything scales according to user adoption. RCS-e deployments can start small and scale to the entire customer base, but it’s manageable growth that can be achieved through success, reducing risk and CAPEX.

With a largely OPEX driven model, it’s much simpler to build a plan to deploy RCS. There’s no reason why any operator, large or small, can’t deploy RCS-e right now. As we’ve noted before, it’s really just an evolution of messaging. It’s the next generation and will become a universal service. The question is how quickly we can turn that vision into reality.

--Brent