Infonetics Research released the results on a new market study which tracks Rich Communication Suite (RCS) service revenue, subscribers, mobile phones and user clients.
In a world where mobile communications is quickly evolving, all service providers need to continue driving voice and data usage while enriching the overall communications experience.
RCS aims to unify the communications experience by integrating presence, voice, chat, and multimedia services seamlessly to the user. It is an attractive opportunity considering the total available market of 1 billion worldwide 3G subscribers that will exist in 2010.
However, the success of RCS hinges on a number of factors, including operators achieving service interoperability and native integration of RCS in mobile devices.
"If done right, though, service providers will be able to tap into increased revenue streams from services and applications, particularly mobile broadband, text messaging, and data services," said Diane Myers, Infonetics Research analyst.
Highlights of the Infonetics market study follow:
- By 2010, the first full year of RCS availability, Infonetics forecasts there will be 1.3 million RCS subscribers, mostly in Western Europe, the rest in Asia Pacific.
- RCS subscriber growth is expected to ramp quickly across Europe and Asia, and spread to North America and Central/Latin America by 2013 as RCS becomes more widely available on 3G devices and mobile operators achieve interoperability.
- The core feature sets of RCS include enriched calling (sharing videos, images, and other multimedia during a voice call), enhanced messaging (e.g., multimedia, chat, and file transfer messaging), and the enhanced phonebook, which adds service capabilities to the mobile phone network address book, or NAB.
- The network address book will play a pivotal role in the success of RCS; future capabilities such as auto-populating from diverse sources (LinkedIn, Facebook, MS Outlook, etc.) will enable increased communications across multiple media.
