Airtel working with Google to launch RCS: report

Details: John Tanner; Category: Operators; 08 December 2025; 6808 views

Indian telco Bharti Airtel is reportedly coordinating with Google to use its platform to launch rich communication services (RCS) messaging – making it the last of India’s private telcos to do so – once anti-spam measures are sorted out.

Rival telcos Reliance Jio and Vodafone Idea already use Google to offer RCS services, but Airtel has held off on following suit due to concerns that RCS would open another channel for spammers to target customers.

According to a report from ETTelecom on Monday, an Airtel spokesperson confirmed that it is working with Google to make sure that all RCS messages go through its AI-powered spam detection system.

“Only once this is implemented, we would be pleased to be on board RCS with Google,” the spokesperson told the newspaper.

The report also cites unnamed industry executives saying that Airtel intends to charge INR0.11 (US$0.01) per message under an 80:20 revenue share arrangement with Google.

With Airtel joining the RCS party with Jio and Vi, industry watchers expect the next step will be to establish RCS interoperability between all three operators, which could mean the introduction of a interconnect usage charge for RCS, the report said.

Airtel launched its network-based, AI-powered spam detection solution in September 2024 to deal with India’s growing mobile spam problem. In its first year of operation, according to stats released by the Ministry of Home Affairs’ Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (MHA-I4C), Airtel’s network has seen a 68.7% decrease in the value of financial losses and a 14.3% drop in overall cybercrime incidents.

In September, Airtel vice chair and MD Gopal Vittal said its spam detection system has identified over 48.3 billion spam calls and blocked 320,000 fraudulent links since it was installed.