China Mobile is to mount a challenge to WeChat, China’s most popular messaging service, by rolling out Rich Communications Services (RCS).
The operator has selected ZTE to provide RCS architecture, according to a report on Tuesday by the South China Morning Post. Internal testing is underway and services are expected to launch later this year.
China Mobile has set a target reaching 16 million RCS users by the end of 2015, but the equipment being delivered by ZTE has the capacity to support up to 100 million users.
"This is the trump card China Mobile has in hand to compete with over-the-top (OTT) services," said ZTE vice president Fang Hui, in the report.
However, even for a company as ambitious as China Mobile, taking on WeChat is a tall order.
According to WeChat parent Tencent’s most recent interim report, the messaging service had 438 million monthly active users (MAUs) as of the end of June 2014, putting up there in terms of popularity with Facebook-owned WhatsApp, which had around 700 million MAUs as of January this year.
Developed over a number of years by the GSMA, RCS is a suite of IP-based communication services that supports instant messaging, mid-call file sharing, and video calling. It rolled out commercially in 2012 under the name Joyn, and while it has been implemented by a number of operators, the majority of consumers still use popular OTT services like Skype and WhatsApp.
Nonetheless, ZTE insisted that because RCS is a carrier-grade service integrated into a handset, it stands a fighting chance against apps like WeChat.
"Service quality of RCS is much [more] reliable than that of OTT, things like losing your message will never happen because it is on the network owned by the operator,"said Fang, in the SCMP report.
