BARCELONA, Spain, February 15 /PRNewswire/ --

- 60 Operators and Vendors Back Initiative; GSMA Releases First RCS 
Specification

The GSMA today reported significant progress in the Rich Communication
Suite (RCS) Initiative, a service providing interoperable, enriched
communication capabilities such as in-call multimedia sharing, conversational
messaging and presence-enhanced contact management, all accessible through a
user's mobile phone contact list. The initiative has generated considerable
momentum across a number of fronts since the GSMA brought RCS into its work
programme in September 2008, including the delivery of the RCS Release 1
specification, the addition of new programme participants and the successful
completion of interoperability tests.

"We live in a world where users want to be able to communicate and access
and share information any place, any time, over any device," said Michael
O'Hara, chief marketing officer for the GSMA. "RCS supports these
requirements, providing users the ability to launch a variety of enhanced
communications, all from the personal contact lists in their mobile devices.
Importantly, mobile operators are ideally positioned to deliver these new
communications services to the mass market and drive mainstream adoption,
with a combined user base of 3 billion people. It's a win-win for operators
and for business users and consumers."

The GSMA recently issued the first technical specification for RCS,
defining the feature set for the first version of the service and ensuring
that vendors will be able to develop standard, interoperable implementations.
The specification outlines the requirements for features including:

-- Enhanced Address Book -- provides presence and capability indications,
       enables users to initiate communications including voice calls, video
       calls, file transfers or messaging, and allows users to integrate
       multimedia elements, such as photos of contacts.
    -- Rich Call -- enables users to exchange different types of content,
       Such as video or photos, during a call.
    -- Rich Messaging -- expands on traditional instant messaging to simplify
       and unify multiple messaging mediums and provide a richer user
       experience.



Future releases will include providing RCS functionality on other
platforms such as PCs, offering a seamless user experience across PCs and
mobiles.

"Today a mobile user utilises separate and distinct services, resulting
in a disconnected communications experience. RCS addresses this issue by
providing enhanced and integrated services that can be customisable," said
Diane Myers, Directing Analyst for Service Provider VoIP and IMS at
Infonetics Research. "The ability to utilise the core components of RCS to
enhance other applications and services is very compelling, and RCS
represents an important milestone for operators to offer and market seamless
and differentiated service capabilities."

The number of operators and vendors supporting RCS has doubled in the
past 5 months, growing to 60 participating companies. New members include OKI
Electric Industry Co., Smart Communications, SoftBank Mobile, T-Mobile and
Wind Telecomunicazioni S.p.A., among others. The organisations collaborating
in the RCS initiative are focused on driving the development and adoption of
the industry-standard enhanced communications service.

Last month, the RCS Technology Group held the latest round of
interoperability testing, with 14 companies coming together to test RCS
services on eight different handsets. Attending companies included
Alcatel-Lucent, Comneon, Ecrio, Ericsson, Huawei, LG, Movial, Nokia, Nokia
Siemens Networks, Orange, Samsung, SFR, SK Telecom and Sony Ericsson. Over a
one-week period, participants initiated more than 7,000 RCS sessions, testing
core services including Enhanced Address Book, Content Sharing and Enhanced
Messaging. Importantly, this represented the first joint tests of RCS in an
environment with two operators -- Orange and SFR -- and two infrastructure
suppliers -- Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia Siemens Networks.

"We have made important progress in the RCS initiative to drive the
development and adoption of applications and services that provide an
interoperable, convergent, rich communication experience based on IMS," said
Aude Pichelin, chair of the RCS Initiative and Head of Multimedia Services
Standardisation, Orange. "Following the approval of the RCS technical
specifications and the successful completion of the latest round of
interoperability testing, operators are now ready to start trials of RCS and
plan commercial deployment of the service."

More information on the RCS initiative is available at
http://www.gsmworld.com/rcs.

About the GSMA

The GSMA represents the interests of the worldwide mobile communications
industry. Spanning 219 countries, the GSMA unites more than 750 of the
world's mobile operators, as well as 200 companies in the broader mobile
ecosystem, including handset makers, software companies, equipment providers,
Internet companies, and media and entertainment organisations. The GSMA is
focused on innovating, incubating and creating new opportunities for its
membership, all with the end goal of driving the growth of the mobile
communications industry. For more information, please visit
http://www.gsmworld.com