With the annual Mobile World Congress (MWC) at Barcelona around the corner, there are expectations on telcos around the world to show how they plan to counter-attack their competitors, namely the Over-The-Top (OTT) players. While the much hyped mobile app markets announced by the operators during the earlier MWCs proved to be a damp squib , the OTT players such as Skype, GTalk, WhatsApp, and Kakao Talk have made significant breakthroughs in garnering the Internet Telephony and related market share. Much to the chagrin of the operators, Facebook with its more than 800 million users recently added VoIP feature to its messenger app, thus enabling all its users to talk to each other for free! Apart from offering cheap telephony using the power of the Internet, the OTT players have occupied a significant position in the digital value chain, thus making inroads in to mobile advertisement, marketing, commerce, and so on. On the other hand, the telcos have been relegated to just a bandwidth pipe provider, without much say on the value of services provided through their bit pipes.

In our earlier articles dated 19th October and 16th November in eWorld, we discussed how even OTT players may be ousted by technologies such as Web RTC that provides peer-to-peer rich communication services over the web browser and is being standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force and World Wide Web Consortium. Realizing this, the GSM Association (GSMA - the largest professional body supported by the mobile operators worldwide) started the initiative and standardization of Rich Communication Services (RCS) – brand named “JOYN” - including enhanced messaging and enriched call experience (including video, multimedia) over the operators’ IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) platform. In this article, we discuss a ray of hope offered by the GSMA supported RCS to the telcos for gainfully embracing Web RTC and compete effectively against the OTT players.

RCS-e is a subset of RCS specifications to provide chat, image and video share capabilities on enhanced address book that includes “presence” information and provisions for geolocation exchange. The operators have started including RCS as a bundled service to enhance the stickiness of the users. The unique differentiating factor of this offering compared to the traditional OTT offering is that RCS provides guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS) since it is offered over the managed IP network of the operators and hence is carrier-grade. Users have a single point-contact (i.e. the operator) for their complaints and redressals. As more operators deploy it, global inter-operability and roaming are assured. What is more? Recently GSMA released Application Program Interfaces (API) support for HTML5 and Web RTC so that applications based on RCS can be built by third party developers to be accessed through the Web browser.

It is expected that there will be about 15 Million RCS users worldwide by 2013 and is expected to reach 73.6 Million by 2016. We have seen some action worldwide as South Korea’s SK Telecom, Metro PCS in the US, Telefonica, Orange, Telecom Italia, Deutsche Telekom and Vodafone in Europe, all vying to provide RCS over their LTE networks to compete against OTT players. However, adoption of RCS by users need more than QoS; the Quality of Experience (QoE) provided by the overlay applications is important.

The tenet of RCS is that the standardized APIs will be used by developers to build powerful communication applications. Will there be any traction along these lines? Why should a developer who builds applications for the more attractive iOS or Android platforms shift their attention towards this operator supported initiative? Only if the operators provide them a better bargain in terms of enhanced revenue sharing and nurtures a device/developer ecosystem much like Apple and Google. Again the mantra for success of operator provided RCS is “don’t hook on to the walled garden approach” which made them succumb to OTTs. It is time that the telcos provide a new meaning to telephony and enhance the range of communication services through RCS and Web RTC to compete effectively against the OTT players.

With the commoditization of voice service, we have been hearing in the news that the top mobile operators in India who have sunk huge money for spectrum have been sending their top honchos to developed telecom markets such as South Korea, Europe and the U.S. to understand the mobile ecosystem and monetization models for mobile broadband services. Though there is hype around mobile data being the driver of revenue, we have not seen much action in this front from the operators. We have been hearing Voice-Over LTE from the Broadband Wireless Access providers in India for quite some time now; however lacking in action on the ground. The insipid response to mobile broadband adoption in the country has kept the OTT players away from taking any active part. Can users in India expect something different from the off-beat SMS based Value Added Services? It is time that we see actions on mobile broadband in the country.

(The writers are employed at Sasken Communication Technologies. Views are personal.)

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