I have a bit of good news for Telus and fellow Koodo customers, especially those who are using Samsung smartphones. Canadian telecommunications company Telus and its flanker brand Koodo are now expanding RCS (rich communication services) support to Samsung phones on their network.
For those who are not familiar with RCS, here’s a definition from Wikipedia:
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 the broader IP Multimedia Subsystem.
So basically, RCS is the next-gen replacement for SMS/MMS. Like instant messengers, RCS offers features like typing indicators, read receipts, stickers and group conversation support.
Based on these Telus support page and Koodo support page, in order for its customers to have access to RCS, their device needs to be running Android 9.0 Pie or later as well as the latest version of Samsung Messages which is the default text messaging app that is preinstalled on all Samsung devices.
In my case, I’ve been using RCS on my Samsung Galaxy A50 for several months now. I was able to activate or enable RCS by using an Android trick and using Google Messages as my default text messaging app.
Anyone here who’s with Telus or Koodo? Are you already using RCS or have RCS enabled on your smartphone? How do you like it so far? Please share your thoughts by leaving a comment below.
