Google has collaborated with Telenor forces to introduce Rich Communications Services (RCS) in India, Europe, and other Asian countries. Earlier the search engine giant has also collaborated with Sprint in the US market and Rogers in Canadian market respectively.
Telenor network is well known for its Short Message Service (SMS) offers in the industry for a long time. However, the telecom hasn’t received any massive upgrade over the time. Telenor will now provide a “more enhanced messaging experience” to SMS users with this collaboration with Google. Thus, Telenor could offer the much needed and long overdue upgrade.
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The RCS is a part of GSMA’s advanced messaging standard, and Google refers it as an “enhanced version of SMS which brings along support for features like group chat, high-res photosharing, read receipts and more.” Resembles like Apple iMessage? Yes, it does deliver almost similar features. Google merge its own Messenger app for Android with the regular smartphone SMS app.
As of now, Telenor has a reasonable subscriber base of 214 million across multiple countries in Asia and Europe which include Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Hungary, Montenegro, Bulgaria, Pakistan, Serbia, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Thailand, and India.
Subscribers in the above regions can make use of RCS through an app update. And for this, the subscriber has to install Messenger app on his/her Android handset. If not available by default, the app is available at Google Play Store.
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Google’s blog post also mentioned that “Many smartphones that will be launched going forward will come with Google’s Messenger app as default SMS and RCS messaging app.” Google acquired Jibe (an RCS specialist) which started picking up some space for RCS.
