Bharti Airtel has signed a pact with Google that will bring Rich Communication Services (RCS) messaging to its network, after a year of declining to do so.
RCS has been touted as the successor of the traditional Short Message Service (SMS), as it overcomes many limitations of the traditional messaging format, especially the 160-character limit and no end-to-end encryption. Google's own Messages app, which uses RCS bypassing telecom companies, accounts for one billion messages daily.
As per the 80:20 revenue share arrangement with Google, Airtel will charge Rs 0.11 per RCS message, industry executives told Economic Times.
Though Reliance Jio and Vodafone-Idea have already signed agreements to enable RCS on their networks, Airtel was reluctant, as it felt users could be spammed using encrypted RCS.
It was only after the US tech giant agreed to put spam filters in place that India's second-largest telecom network joined the RCS bandwagon, more than a decade after the Global System for Mobile Communications Association (GSMA), the global telecom industry body, introduced it in 2007.
"We are closely working with Google on stringent guidelines for the RCS messages to ensure that these go through our spam-based AI filter,” an Airtel spokesperson said, as per the report.
“Only once this is implemented, we would be pleased to be onboard RCS with Google."
With Airtel effectively giving the green light, India's upcoming RCS network is set to compete with WhatsApp.
Once Airtel fully comes onboard after the resolution of the spam filters issue, the next step will be negotiations among operators to enable off-net RCS information sharing.
This is set to transform the new messaging ecosystem by bringing in new tariffs, such as an interconnect usage charge (IUC).
An IUC is a charge paid by one service operator—on which the call is started—for carrying over a call to another network, on which the call is completed.
“As of now, Google is just a platform provider, and telecom companies are expected to negotiate IUC among each other since RCS volumes are on a rise," the report noted.
