When it comes to communications, one of the biggest developing trends is Web-based real time communications (WebRTC), a technology that's poised to make voice and video chat -- even file-sharing in some cases -- as simple as a Web browser can make it. Popular voice chat application Vonage is looking to take advantage of the power of WebRTC itself, as reports state the company is planning to use WebRTC in its mobile application.
WebRTC is typically thought of as a browser application, and with good reason. But there's a second variety of WebRTC functionality known as the WebRTC Native Stack that can step in for mobile. WebRTC Native Stack represents the essential source code for WebRTC, and with that, Vonage can take advantage to make code that can be used on iOS and Android devices, or in short, mobile apps.
Better yet, Vonage and WebRTC were, at last report, surprisingly compatible from the word go. Deploying the apps using WebRTC required Vonage to make few, if any, changes, and no major ones either. All that was needed was to establish the signaling and get the proper codecs in place. Once that was ready, it was then possible to have WebRTC on one side of the call and then a completely different media stack on the other side. This even allows for Vonage mobile apps to call stationary Vonage boxes.
But there were challenges afoot as far as getting the whole thing set up went; one of the biggest was scaling down Vonage in terms of storage so it could fit easily on mobile devices, which commonly have much less storage than larger-scale counterparts. Vonage looked to the native capacity of the devices on which Vonage would be installed, and sought to use what resources were on the device to scale down the amount of resources that needed to be brought in with the app. Thanks to WebRTC's open source nature, the process was made about as simple as it could be made.
Recently, Vonage's VP of tech research, Baruch Sterman, Ph.D, sat down with Rich Tehrani to discuss Vonage's plans for WebRTC at the 2013 WebRTC Conference and Expo, and offered a bit more insight on just how the whole thing was done. Sterman underlined how Vonage has been around since the beginning of the voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) era, and further noted that Vonage was looking to “take a leadership role in the technology area.” In fact, Sterman went on to elaborate that he believed that the conditions under which VoIP got started 10 to 15 years prior are actually at least somewhat mirrored in the present day in mobile communications, making Vonage's development into the WebRTC space a natural development path. For the full discussion with Sterman, the video can be found here.
Vonage's development into the WebRTC and mobile arenas is looking to shake up a large chunk of the communications field. Given the compatibility between WebRTC, mobile, and Vonage in general, the convergence of these three fields into one is reasonable. While there are still challenges to face here—Sterman cites video on mobile as still being a substantial problem, but awaits the coming of iOS 7 as a potential improvement. Just where the mobile WebRTC movement ends up remains to be seen, but with Vonage and the like actively developing, we're likely to see results sooner rather than later, and said results are likely to be impressive.
Edited by
Rich Steeves
