Bharti Airtel has joined forces with Google, after a year of keeping a distance with the US technology company over offering rich communication services (RCS) messaging on the Indian telecom operator\u2019s network.<\/p>\n
Both companies have signed a pact that would see Airtel soon start offering RCS \u2013 positioned as a successor to traditional SMS \u2013 using Google\u2019s platform.<\/p>\n
Airtel will charge \u20b90.11 per message, under an 80:20 revenue share arrangement with Google, industry executives told ET.<\/p>\n
“We are closely working with Google on stringent guidelines for the RCS messages to ensure that these go through our spam-based AI filter,\u201d said a spokesperson for Airtel, responding to ET\u2019s mail queries. \u201cOnly once this is implemented, we would be pleased to be on board RCS with Google.” <\/p>\n
Unlike Reliance Jio and Vodafone Idea, India\u2019s second-largest telco Airtel had so far declined to partner with Google or Apple to enable RCS. Airtel took the stand that the alternate encrypted channel could spam users. The telco had also approached the telecom regulator seeking to bring OTT communication channels under anti-spam regulations.<\/p>\n
Google has since agreed to integrate RCS with Airtel\u2019s intelligent spam filter, people said, indicating the step could have led to the latest agreement between the two.<\/p>\n
With this move, all the three major telcos in India have embraced RCS, setting the stage for a broader challenge to WhatsApp\u2019s dominance in business messaging. <\/p>\n
The next step will be negotiations among operators to enable off-net RCS interoperability, a move that could introduce an interconnect usage charge (IUC) into the new messaging ecosystem, experts said. <\/p>\n
\u201cBeing a GSMA standard, RCS, globally is emerging as a telco-controlled channel in terms of pricing and rules of service, although it is not regulated by telecom regulators,\u201d said an expert. \u201cAs 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, making it the next lucrative business segment after SMS.\u201d <\/p>\n
RCS is a global messaging standard developed by global telecom industry body GSMA in 2007 to replace SMS. It includes rich features like read receipts, file sharing, group chats, location sharing, and encryption. The goal was to create a universal standard for carrier-based messaging that could compete with internet-based apps like WhatsApp, iMessage, and WeChat. <\/p>\n
However, for years, adoption was slow in the absence of a unified rollout with each carrier implementing it differently. In 2019, Google bypassed telcos and enabled RCS directly through its own \u2018Google Messages\u2019 app, starting in the UK and France.<\/p>\n
Currently, Google Messages is the main driver of RCS adoption, accounting for 1 billion messages daily.<\/p>\n
The India CPaaS (communication-platform-as-a-service) market, estimated at $1.01 billion in 2025, will grow to $3.06 billion by 2030, according to Mordor Intelligence. Earlier estimates by Gartner showed the market will reach $3.2 billion by 2028 from $1.3 billion in 2023.<\/p>\n
Both OTT channels – WhatsApp and RCS – are set to reach a combined market of $1.6 billion and capture half of the value share of India\u2019s commercial messaging market, Gartner said.<\/p>\n
A joint report by Omdia and Infobip projected RCS alone to account for $544 million in revenue by 2029, generated from 21 billion messages from India. This would be 25% of the RCS revenues in Asia and Oceania during the period.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Bharti Airtel has joined forces with Google, after a year of keeping a distance with the US technology company over offering rich communication services (RCS) messaging on the Indian telecom operator\u2019s network. Both companies have signed a pact that would see Airtel soon start offering RCS \u2013 positioned as a successor to traditional SMS \u2013 using Google\u2019s platform. Airtel will charge \u20b90.11 per message, under an 80:20 revenue share arrangement with Google, industry executives told ET. “We are closely working with Google on stringent guidelines for the RCS messages to ensure that these go through our spam-based AI filter,\u201d said […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-979061","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-telecom"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/979061","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=979061"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/979061\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=979061"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=979061"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=979061"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}