Rich Communication Services (RCS) is a communication protocol between mobile telephone carriers and between phone and carrier, aiming at replacing SMS messages with a text-message system that is richer, provides phonebook polling (for service discovery), and can transmit in-call multimedia. It is part of broader IP Multimedia Subsystem.
The Rich Communication Suite industry initiative was formed by a group of industry promoters in 2007. In February 2008 the GSM Association officially became the project 'home' of RCS and an RCS steering committee was established by the organisation.
The scope of the steering committee's work was to entail the definition, testing, and integration of the services in the application suite known as RCS.Three years later, the RCS project released a new specification – RCS-e (e = 'enhanced'), which included various iterations of the original RCS specifications. The GSMA program is now called Rich Communication Services.
