Google partners with Telenor to roll out its SMS service in Europe and Asia including India

Telenor is joining forces with Google to provide advanced SMS services in India. Here's what you need to know

By: News Desk |
February 17, 2017 8:16 pm

Telenor is getting a taste of Google’s Rich Communications Services (RCS), an upgraded form of SMS service that lets users see when their message has been delivered and when the other person is typing a reply among others.

“Today, we’re excited to announce that we’re partnering with Telenor to enable the launch of RCS messaging to their 214 million subscribers across Europe and Asia,” the tech giant wrote in a blog post.

The Norwegian telecom giant’s subscribers in Europe and Asia, including Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Hungary, Montenegro, Serbia, Bulgaria, Pakistan, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Thailand, Malaysia and India, will get the access to the advanced features provided by the RCS messaging service on their Android devices via an update for the Messenger app.

While the features like group chat, high-resolution photo sharing and read receipts will come as a default option on Android, the subscribers who don’t have the app can install the Messenger app from the Google Play store. Apart from this, new Android devices will come with Messenger app preloaded as the default SMS and RCS messaging app.

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The new update will be supported by more than 58 carriers and manufacturers collectively that would cover a subscriber base of 4.7 billion people across the globe. “We’ve launched RCS messaging using the universal profile with carriers in the U.S. and Canada, and plan on launching RCS in more countries in the coming months,” Google added in its blog.

Telenor enjoys a user base of 214 million subscribers across Europe and Asia, out of which 44.033 million subscribers are in India.