The first carrier to support Google's Jibe RCS technology was Sprint, back in November of last year. Since then, several carriers in Canada, Asia, and Europe have made the switch. Now it looks like Celcom will support Jibe RCS, becoming the first carrier in Malaysia to do so.

If you need a refresher, RCS is designed to replace SMS, with features like read receipts and high-quality media sharing. Similar to different email services 'talking' to each other, different RCS clouds are inter-operable as long as they use the RCS Universal Profile. Thus, anyone on a carrier supporting Jibe RCS or another Universal Profile cloud can use the technology.

Celcom did not provide a timeline on when Jibe RCS would be fully rolled out to its customers, but hopefully it won't be too long.