WebRTC: The democratization of the communications industry
Do you remember a time before web pages? To do anything in IT you had to be a boffin professional with special access. Then along came the web and everybody’s child could put up a website. If you see that as the democratization of the IT industry, WebRTC is the democratization of the communications industry.
WebRTC stands for Web Real-Time Communications and introduces a real-time media framework in the browser core alongside associated JavaScript APIs for controlling the media frame and HTML5 tags for displaying.
You see, before WebRTC, you had to have either special access (if telecom) or use special plug-ins (if web). Now WebRTC allows anybody to introduce real-time communication to their web page as simply as introducing a table.
At Ericsson, we have a saying that anything that will benefit from having a connection will have one. We can extend that saying here: any context benefiting from communication will contain it. Communication becomes an existing feature in the environment rather than an additional services needing special attention.
Today, there are two standards bodies for defining WebRTC – W3C and IETF.
W3C takes care of the client side of APIs. IETF takes care of the media framework, codecs, session establishment, SDP vs. JSON, which Ericsson co-chairs.
Both standards are expected to be finalized mid this year. So while we will see early releases of experimental browsers this year, Google Chrome being the first, we expect others.
However, as these implementations are experimental, they are not interoperable. We believe interoperable implementations will start to appear in 2012, with market ubiquity happening in 2014.
Check back tomorrow for my next post on the technical issues WebRTC faces, and how we are working to resolve them.
Written by Geoff Hollingworth
Head of IP Services, Region North America Geoff is responsible for implementing Ericsson’s future IP Services Strategy in North America. Before this, Geoff led Ericsson’s next generation multimedia initiative to drive the three screen experience for the Volvo Ocean Race. He joined Ericsson 17 years ago and has been actively involved in delivering and promoting Mobile Broadband software. Follow Geoff on Twitter @50b
