Zhang Yunyong, general manager of China Unicom Product Center, said that 5G Message, or RCS Message, is now in the testing phase and will be officially commercialized in the third quarter.
On April 8, China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom joined forces with 11 partners to release a white paper on 5G news.
5G Message is RCS messaging, which allows users to implement various rich applications of APP in the SMS interface.
It can be divided into "RCS Enhanced Messaging" for end-users and "RCS Business Rich Media Messaging" for business enterprises.
It allows individual users to connect with various service platforms and businesses, and allows RCS to enhance information and support rich media message pushing, which is comparable to WeChat in terms of functionality.
5G Message breaks the traditional SMS length limit, realizes the fusion of text, picture, audio and video, emoji, etc. It also supports online payment, online and offline messaging, and can initiate group sending and group chatting at any time without adding friends.
Industry insiders point out that 5G Message may be billed on a per traffic basis and is expected to be more affordable than current SMS and WeChat.
The 5G Message service is currently being actively tested by major Chinese manufacturers, and is expected to be ready for commercial launch in June.