Interop adds two RCS 5 features

USA: Interop Technologies, a provider of core wireless solutions for advanced messaging, over-the-air handset management, and connectivity gateways, announced that its Rich Communication Services (RCS) solution now supports a network address book and social presence.

The network address book synchronizes a user’s contacts among different devices including mobile phones, tablets, and PCs. With social presence, RCS users receive rich, real-time information, such as availability, location, favorite link, and portrait icon, for each of their contacts.

Interop Technologies is demonstrating its enhanced RCS solution at OMA Demo Day on February 27 during Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

The network address book and social presence features are aligned with the GSMA-managed RCS Blackbird and Crane releases, which include subsets of priority RCS version 5 features. Using an XML document management server (XDMS) and presence server, the Interop solution stores social presence and service capability information and makes it available in real time to RCS users.

Since May 2012, the fully compliant, cloud-based Interop RCS solution has also supported legacy messaging interworking, an RCS version 5 feature providing backward compatibility with Short Message Service (SMS) and Multimedia Message Service (MMS).

Interop has made the enhancements available in its interoperability testing (IOT) environment currently in use by multiple RCS client vendors and smartphone manufacturers. As client and handset vendors release new versions of RCS client software, they can continue to test against the Interop RCS solution to ensure that standards compliance and interoperability are achieved.

RCS, branded as “joyn” by the GSMA, gives subscribers innovative communication options including video chat, one-to-one and group messaging, file transfer, and real-time exchange of image or video files during communication sessions.

Because the Interop solution enables operators to offer RCS without a costly and complex IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) core, operators can compete with popular “over-the-top” (OTT) services without expensive changes to their current network. In addition, Interop’s cloud technology option minimizes up-front costs and speeds time to market.