The RCS
failed to differentiate itself from the existing OTT services since it appeared
in the market for the first time in 2012. Its functions were disappointedly incomplete
and it’s UX/UI was plain and unattractive compared with OTT services. It also
took a long time to stabilize due to its technical complexities and operator’s
slow decision making process. Without any proven best practice of RCS, many
operators are still hesitating to invest their limited budgets in such a free
service. No doubt, operator’s top priority would be LTE and then IMS network.
The RCS lies only at the final step in operator’s roadmap as it is technically
supposed to be deployed on top of IMS network and it is also one of reasons
that slows down operator’s decision making process.
More and more
users are tempted to subscribe to prevailing OTT services and OTT service
providers also keep evolving their services in a way to provide richer user
experiences on top of their own platform. Facebook purchased Whatsapp in Feb
2014 and put its name on the top of the list. WeChat from China is making a lot
of buzz with affluent O2O services being incorporated into its own platform.
With the help of strong supports from domestic market, WeChat is becoming
another worldwide OTT communication service platform. LINE originated
from Japan is step-by-step penetrating into South East Asian market. KakaoTalk
which dominated Korean market but has been staggering outside Korean market has
merged with the second biggest portal service provider in Korea, Daum, seeking out further
growth by gaining more contents strength in this battle.
Figure 1. MAU of OTT services
I. OTT
War
Since
Facebook purchased WhatsApp for $22 billion in 2014, the number of its Monthly
Active Users (MAU) jumped up from 700 million in Jan 2015 to 900 million
in Sep 2015.
WhatsApp and Facebook partnered with
the Reliance Communication in India to provide unlimited services access
for prepaid GSM subscribers with only 16Rs a month.
Facebook’s
another messenger service, Facebook Messenger, has 800 million MAU worldwide at the end
of 2015 up from 300 million at the end of 2014. It supports money transfer service within the application
since Mar 2015 which makes P2P payment easier. It has also launched a limited beta version of
Artificial Intelligence-powered virtual assistant service ‘M’ in 2015, which can possibly
compete with Apple Siri. Users can receive personalized services like
restaurant reservation, weather forecasting based on a route, recommendations
for weekend getaways, etc. Facebook partnered with Uber to provide in-app call for transportation with which users can
request a ride from a car service without needing to download an extra app or
leave a conversation.
WeChat has hit 650 million MAU in 3Q 2015, around 200 million up
from 3Q 2014. It has recently announced that it supports WeChat Out VoIP service which enables
users to make a call to mobile and landlines with much cheaper price. It has
been putting a lot of service features and use
cases
in place on top of its own platform such as Lucky Money (money transfer), Taxi
ride (car sharing), Bills and Payment (mobile payment), Shopping (mobile
commerce), multi-party video chat, banking, fundraising, etc.
LINE has
reached 200
million MAU in 3Q 2015, 30 million up from 3Q 2014. It has been providing
service features like public accounts (for companies), sitckers, games, musics
and TV contents. It has also been publishing many family applications on top of
LINE platform such as fortune telling, cartoon, selfie camera, jobs seeking,
news curation, restaurants, etc. LINE also started providing LineOut feature (same
as WeChat Out) enabling users to making a call towards mobile and landlines
based on phone numbers at much cheaper price. As of now, the revenue of LINE
comes from game (41%), advertisement (30%) and stickers (24%) and they have
markets mainly in Japan, Thailand and Indonesia.
Most OTT
services already supports all the communication features that operators provide, like
messaging and voice/video call. They provide even more affluent value added
features. Users are provided with services useful in their everyday lives without
necessarily leaving their applications such as banking, transportation, job
seeking, news, search, etc. The silos between OTT service is also collapsing as they
started providing reachability to non-subscribers using phone number based
dialing function as is the case of WeChat Out and Line Out.
II. RCS
Figure 2. Operators, Google and OTT
CSPs
When many of
RCS players were worrying about slow market growth of RCS, Google’s
purchase of Jibe Mobile in Sep 2014 was an eye-popping event and it stirred the
RCS industry. Jibe Mobile is one of the leading companies in RCS domain providing
cloud-based RCS hosting service and RCS hub service as well. There has been a
lot of speculations conjured up on Google’s intention of purchasing the company
though, it seems obvious at least for one thing to me:
Google will come up with native RCS
for Android and keep doing Jibe Mobile’s businesses, i.e., hosted RCS and RCS
hub services.
§
The
Android market share in 2Q 2015 is over 80% according to the IDC report. Even though there are
already a bunch of people locked in OTT services around the world, the number of
users using native messaging service is still not ignorable. Native RCS for
Android will be able to appeal to those users as iMessage did.
§
Operators
came to have one more option for building RCS, which is using hosted RCS
service. Even though the concept of hosted RCS service model has already been
existing and provided by many of RCS companies, the same service backed by
Google would give quite a different impression in terms of stability and
reliability. Small and middle sized operators in particular may prefer to use
Google’s native RCS and hosted RCS service for a while before they make a decision
on whether they need to have their own RCS platform or not. Google may provide
open APIs for RCS enabling operators to customize their own RCS clients.
§
Solution
vendors will suffer more from narrowed solution market at least in the short
term. More operators will consider using Google’s hosted RCS service or they
will just wait and see. Solution vedors will have to compete with Google.
§
Google
will encourage operators to be engaged in their cloud based hosted RCS and RCS
Hub services thereby they may want to gather more data around the globe. Google
may leverage RCS service to penetrate into SNS markets, which is the area where
Google has always been defeated by other SNS players.
III. Operators
Even though RCS
is lacking business cases and best practices for justification of ROI, there
seems no other way around for operators but to adopt RCS anyway in the long
term. It is the only way for operators to move forward to position themselves
as Communication Service Providers (CSPs). Otherwise, they may have to step
back as a dumb-pipe. Operators understand that, in the long term, controlling
data channels, contents and 3rd-party services on top of their
communication platform envisages new revenue sources.
The
competitiveness of RCS comes only when it is integrated with operator’s
qualified services like VoLTE, ViLTE, VoWi-Fi. The integrated VoLTE/RCS service
uses dedicated network resources. The QoS becomes the only differentiator for
operators to compete with OTT service providers because data traffic from OTT
services goes through the best-effort network and thus they are vulnerable in
case network is congested.
Operators are
taking baby steps in evolving their network and adopting high quality VoLTE service.
According to GSA report published in Oct 2015, 443 operators commercially
launched LTE or LTE-Advanced network across 147 countries and only 30 operators
among them have launched VoLTE-HD voice across 21 countries. The rest of them
may be using SRVCC or CSFB for voice service as an intermediary stage. Building
LTE network and IMS Core takes quite a long time. RCS lies at the end of the
roadmap of their network evolution. When operators are ready to deploy RCS
service, it is highly possible that users are already locked in by OTT
services. Even when there is no dominating OTT services yet, it will take long time again for operators to adopt and stabilize RCS.
The interoperability may not be the key differentiator for operators to compete with OTT services
though, it is one of the most important functions to implement. As the
interoperability of RCS leans on IMS network in principle, the technical
complexities of operator’s network and business agreement among different
operators shall be sorted out. Network integration and interoperability test
among operators will also be time-consuming and costly.
Lastly,
operators need to consider mitigating data traffic as RCS is known to cause
heavy traffic. RCS client performs SIP OPTIONS based service capability
discovery for each and every contact stored in user’s address book at its first
invoke and the procedure repeats based on the configured polling period. As
more and more contacts turn to be RCS subscribers, the list of RCS contacts
will be created as an xml document and uploaded to the network to which
Presence based service capability discovery is applied. The Presence based
service capability discovery procedure causes increasing traffic of back-end
subscriptions within the network.
Given these
issues, operators need to figure out the simplest and fastest way to launch RCS
service. The followings are several types of categories for RCS solution
suggested by major solution providers like Jibe
Moble
(acquired by Google), InterOp, GenBand, Summit
Technology,
MiTel, Nable
Communications,
etc..
§
Turn key solution for
self-implementation:
easy for customization and deploying operator’s own differentiators but costly.
No major issues to support integrated VoLTE/RCS service later.
§
Cloud based RCS hosting: best fit for operators
who want to avoid complex integration and reduce the operational and finalcial risk,
but operator specific customization won’t be easy . Not clear about how to technically
support integrated VoLTE/RCS service when the operator already has or after it
comes to have its own IMS core.
§
Cloud based RCS Hub: cost-effective to build
interoperability with other operators and best fit for all the operators, but
operator specific customization won’t be easy.
§
RCS in a box: RCS AS combined with
simplified IMS Core and optimized in the same box, best fit for operators who
do not have IMS core or want to offload RCS traffic at reduced cost.
IV. Considerations
for RCS deployment
The most
important aspects to consider when building RCS are to meet the time-to-market
requirement and to avoid technical complexities.
§
Minimization of RCS complexities
RCS
specifications have been evolving from RCSe to RCS Blackbird and to RCS 5.3 as
of now. As they evolve, there are lots of service features defined. However,
operators do not have to bring full-fledged RCS functionalities from the
beginning, which could be over specifications and inefficient way of spending
limited resources. Just start with basic functions such as IP Chat + Legacy Interworking
and take lean startup approach to roll out the functionalities.
§
Minimization of IMS
complexities
It will take quite
a long time to build full IMS functionalities. Rather than that, it would be better
to consider simplified IMS core for a start. When there needs a full-fledged
IMS core for VoLTE, some components of simplified IMS core can be reused as a
part of full-fleged IMS Core or simply saying, can remain as it is to offload
the RCS traffic from the VoLTE traffic.
§
Using Cloud solutions
Cloud based
hosted RCS and RCS hub solutions can be good approaches to realizing the RCS
service without putting much efforts. Operators will be able to mitigate the
risk and reduce time and cost. Upon taking this approach, operators may need to
consider functional flexibilities (for customization) and data availability
(for user analysis) provided by cloud service providers.
The following
would be one of possible network topologies where different types of RCS
deployment are mixed up for each operator.
Figure 3. RCS deployment
V. Conclusion
OTT CSPs are
growing fast with rich communication service features and building their
eco-system. In a sense, OTT services are becoming an operating platform that
nurtures 3rd-party service providers working on top of it. Operators
are more focusing on evolving their network to provide All-IP communication
platform, which is time and resource consuming. Even Operators already
providing VoLTE service are also waiting to see Google’s next move for RCS.
As of now, leaning
on Google’s RCS infrastructure (i.e., RCS hosting, RCS hub, Android RCS client)
becomes another option for operators to take. Google may leverage its affluent
contents and Google analytics tool for their own RCS being accepted by
operators. Google will provide its own RCS service like iMessage sooner rather
than later accelerating the replacement of legacy messaging to RCS. Given this
option, operators may be able to turn on their RCS whenever they want. Users will
still hold on to OTT services. Native RCS will be complementary to OTT
services from user’s perspective.
Solution
vendors need to compete with Google as to cloud based RCS solutions. They shall leverage tight business relationship with their local operators
and provide extreme flexibility and more customizable options in their systems. RCS
sales is not going to be only selling a product. It will become more likely selling a
service. Not to mention the reliable and stable RCS solutions, solution vendors
shall be able to provide consulting services including but not limited to operator’s
network optimization, traffic optimization, user analysis, service rolling-out
strategy, etc.
Red Mouse
