Google has Inked Android RCS Communications Deal with Telenor
The news was there in the market for a very long time, Originally known as Backrub, Google revealed its partnership with the Norwegian telecom company, “Telenor” on Thursday to offer RCS (Rich Communications Services), an advanced messaging service in Europe and Asia. The service is stacked with multiple features, including photo sharing, group chats, and read receipts just to name a few.
Google said that Telenor will roll out RCS messaging service with its 214 million users across Europe and Asia, including in Denmark, Sweden, Hungary, Norway, Bulgaria, Montenegro, Serbia, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Thailand, Malaysia, India and Pakistan. This will allow the users to avail new messaging features as a regular function of their Android devices.
The search engine giant has inked similar partnerships with Sprint and Rogers Communications in the U.S and Canada respectively.
In the list of Google’s major RCS partnerships, Telenor reserves the third place. In November 2016, Internet Mogul publicized similar ties with U.S.’s Sprint in order to let Sprint’s Android users avail RCS messaging, while December was the partnership month for Canada’s Rogers Communications to kick-off RCS messaging for Roger’s subscribers.
However, the company still claims to have more RCS launches on its plate so we can expect more operators on the third carrier partners list of the company soon.
The Telenor subscriber residing in Europe and Asia need to have an updated Messenger app installed in their phones to use the RCS service. Subscribers who don’t have Messenger on their android devices can install the app from Google Play store. Besides, new android devices will have Messenger preinstalled as the default messaging app.
Google, in 2016, declared its intentions and upcoming initiatives to foster the usage of a common, worldwide RCS profile offered by different operators. Google has taken initiatives to work with different large telecom operators, like Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone, Orange and Sprint to create standard configurations, functionalities and implementations for RCS. The number of carriers and device manufacturers that are eager to use RCS has reached to 58.
The main purpose behind introducing this technology is to enable SMS users to send and receive both, text and multimedia messages, with utmost ease and functionality that is currently supported by over- the-top (OTT) messaging software, such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. These OTT messaging services have been driving a great share of messaging traffic away from the carriers and service operators. RCS can be a great initiative in bringing standard text message services back to life.
With this news spreading across the world like a fire, there are many speculations about how they would team up or what strategy they would use to ensure that people move from their current messaging app to this new Google messenger. Needless to say, it would be a big challenge for both of the companies as it is a proving ground to prove their mettle.
For now, let’s have our fingers crossed and just to see what consequences RCS will bring. And, maybe we have to wait for a good, long while.
Author Bio:
David Harris is a logo designer at Logo Glaze where he is creates custom logo design service. He is a graphic designer by profession but he is a writer in nature. He has an experience of more than a decade in the digital industry and loves to help people achieve their dreams. You can follow him on his Twitter as well.
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