There is yet another new threat/opportunity for the telecom industry in WebRTC. That stands for Web Real Time Communication and is a project to create an open standard for delivering high-quality voice and data applications for a wide variety of platforms including browsers and mobile phones, all using the same set of protocols.
The most immediate use for the new standard is building direct voice and video communication applications from every major web browser. The project is being funded and developed by Google, Mozilla, and Opera. Microsoft has said that they are working towards developing a real-time WebRTC app for Internet Explorer.
From a user perspective, WebRTC will enable anybody to initiate voice and/or video communication with anybody else using a browser or using a WebRTC-enabled device. What is unique about this effort is that the brains of the communication platform will be built into the browser, meaning that an external communications program will not be required to make such a connection. This creates browser-to-browser communication and cuts out a host of existing software platforms used today to perform this function.
This means that the big browser companies are making a big play for a piece of the communications market. The WebRTC platform will put a lot of pressure on other existing applications. For example, WebRTC could become the de facto standard for unified communications. This would let the browser companies tackle this business, which is today controlled by softswitch, router, or software vendors.
WebRTC is also going to directly compete with all of the various communication platforms like GoToMeeting and Skype. I know I maintain half a dozen such platforms on my computer that I’ve needed to view slide shows from different clients or vendors. WebRTC would do away with these intermediate platforms and let anybody on a WebRTC browser communicate with somebody else with WebRTC. You should be able to have a web meeting where there are participants on Google Chrome, Mozilla Foxfire, or Internet Explorer, all viewing and discussing a slide show together from their different platforms.
In the next generation of the standard the group will be developing what they call Object-RTC, which will be a platform that will integrate the Internet of Things into the same communications platform. This will enable anybody from any browser to easily communicate with devices that are on the Object-RTC platform, making it far easier for the normal person to integrate the IoT into their daily lives. This could become the standard platform that will allow you to communicate with your IoT devices equally easily from your PC, tablet, or smartphone. This is presumably a market grab by the browser companies to make sure that the smartphone doesn’t become the only interface to the IoT.
While the WebRTC development effort is largely being funded by Google and the other browser companies, numerous other companies have been developing WebRTC applications in an effort to keep themselves relevant in the future communications market.
Since the WebRTC platform is browser-based, it’s estimated that it will be available to 6 billion devices by the end of 2019. One would think that browser-based communications will grow to be a major means of communicating by then, putting additional pressure on companies today that make a living from providing voice.
Because it’s browser-based, WebRTC is likely to have more of an initial impact on the residential market. Larger businesses today communicate using custom software packages, and as WebRTC becomes the standard those platforms will likely all incorporate the new standard. To that effect we have already seen some large companies snag some of the early WebRTC developers. For example, Telfonica acquired start-up Tokbox in 2012. More recently, the education software services company Blackboard bought Requestec. And Snapchat paid $30 million to buy WebRTC startup AddLive.
One can expect a mature WebRTC platform to transform online communications. If people widely accept WebRTC (or the one of many different programs that will use the software), then it could quickly become the standard way of communicating. What is clear is that with companies like Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla behind the effort, this new communications standard is going to become a major player in the communications business. This is going to be mean fewer minutes on the POTS telephone network. It will also put huge pressure on intermediate communications platforms like GoToMeeting, and those kind of services might eventually disappear. I remember hearing somebody say a decade ago that voice would eventually be a commodity, and this is yet another step towards making voice free.