Earlier this month Fippo published a post analyzing Slack’s new WebRTC implementation. He did not have direct access or a team account to do a thorough deep dive – not to mention he is supposed to be taking some off this month. That left many with some open questions? Is there more to the TURN network? How does multi-party calling work? How exactly is Slack using the Janus gateway? Fortunately WebRTC has an awesomely active and capable community that quickly picked up the slack (pun intended).
A couple of decades ago if you bought something of any reasonable complexity, odds are it came with a call center number you had to call in case something went wrong. Perhaps like the airline industry, economic pressures on contact centers shifted their modus operandi from customer delight to cost reduction. Unsurprisingly this has not done well for contact center public sentiment. Its no wonder the web came along to augment and replace much of this experience – but no where near all it. Today, WebRTC offers a unique opportunity for contact centers to combine their two primary means of customer interaction – the web and phone calls – and entirely change the dynamic to the benefit of both sides.
The first post we published on webrtcHacks was ‘A Hitchhiker’s Guide to WebRTC standardization’ (July 2013) where we gave some initial insight on activities in the 3GPP around WebRTC and IMS. Since then the situation has certainly evolved (well, probably not as fast as some would have expected). Since we regularly receive emails asking about the status/progress on WebRTC standardization within the 3GPP, we spent some time with our friend Antón Román, CTO at Quobis and author of the popular post ‘Anatomy of a WebRTC SDP’ to summarize the current status of the ‘WebRTC access to IMS’ effort.
As I mentioned in my ‘WebRTC meets telecom’ article a couple of weeks ago, at Quobis we’re currently involved in 30+ WebRTC field trials/POCs which involve in one way or another a telco network. In most cases service providers are trying to provide WebRTC-based access to their existing/legacy infrastructure and services (fortunately, in some cases it’s not limited to do only that). To achieve all this, one of the pieces they need to deploy is a WebRTC Gateway. But, what is a WebRTC Gateway anyway? A year ago I had the chance to provide a first answer during the Kamailio World Conference 2013 (see my presentation WebRTC and VoIP: bridging the gap) but, since Lorenzo Miniero has recently released an open source, modular and general purpose WebRTC gateway called Janus, I thought it would be great to get him to share his experience here.
