I’ll focus on the impacts of WebRTC to the existing VoIP industry at large. But first, it’s helpful to understand how we got here.

Early Day Telephony
Telephony has a long history and it’s played an important role in the creation of worldwide commerce. Despite the fact that we all are talking less on the phone each month, the reality is voice remains an important component of our communications. The voice industry has a rather large ego and hasn’t wanted to play well with other technologies. It was in the market all by itself for a long time and acceptance of the Internet hasn’t come easy.

If you understand how a voice call is made today and the underlying complexity associated with each call, you would consider it a small miracle that any phone call manages to reach it’s end destination. The only reason this happens with any certainty is that voice networks have been over engineered with a huge amount of complexity and cost. Unfortunately, this concept of how a network should operate is diametrical to how the Internet was conceived, which is in fact, the beginning of the problem.

Enter VoIP
The telephone industry obviously saw the rapid acceptance of IP technologies and decided they didn’t want to be left behind.  The majority of the complexity of a telephone call is signalling and routing. I need to signal I want to make a telephone call, provide information on who I’m trying to reach and the “network” needs to figure out how to do this. Thus there was a need for a signalling system that worked over an IP network.

The industry initially created a new signalling protocol for this known as H.323. But H.323 was extremely complex and cumbersome and required a great deal of knowledge to build, operate and maintain a voice network. It was also mostly designed for point-to-point calling and really didn’t take into account that the Internet is based upon a mesh network design. Nor did H.323 networks scale very well to handle the tremendous amount of calling that happens.  But a phone call could work, but it was ugly to watch and really was only IP in name alone.

At about this time, a group of non-telecom people were looking at this and thought there surely must be a better way. They saw the model being Internet email. Let me backtrack and over simplify. Today, when I send you an email, my email server “calls” your email server asks if “Joe lives here” and if the answer is YES, then says “here’s an email for Joe.” Internet email works well, you and I use it nearly daily and with only scant problems.

So this group figured they would take the principles of Internet email (which looked a helluva of lot like making a phone call) and write specifications for a new VoIP protocol that would be easy to understand and implement. This protocol was SIP or Session Initiation Protocol. The concept this group had was that MY telephone server could call YOUR telephone server and we’d have a phone call, just like email. SIP talks using plain text (for the most part) and if you look at SIP messages, it looks awfully like a email transaction using SMTP. On the face of it, this seem like a great solution.

The telephone industry thought this was a grand idea until they realized that if your telephone server calls my telephone server, exactly what was the telephone company doing to “add” any value? Who makes any money when you send an email? Well .. nobody. SIP quickly started to sound like the end of their business as they knew it. So the telephone industry decided to the only real way to kill this was to to “help” the SIP specification grow. Rather grow in complexity.

Over the course of the last years, the telephone industry has taken SIP, which was rather simple to start with and basically layered in 50 years of telephone requirements. Lacking an international standard organization to mandate what SIP should be, SIP has mutated in multiple flavors that may not be understood by another supposedly SIP compliant device. This, of course, has spawned a whole new industry who make sophisticated protocol converters which convert one type of SIP message to another. All of this in the name of making telephone calls simpler. Obviously, no good deed goes unpunished.

… continued

The telephone industry had a need to make phone calls using IP but had an equally important need to protect their turf. Phone calls were difficult, they are important and money needs to be made. The industry now had SIP and they had engineered enough complexity and secret handshakes into it to ensure that no casual passer-by would dare to try to enter their domain and if they did, they’d have to play by the nearly impossible rules that the telecom industry had created.

The industry happily set off installing VoIP SIP equipment and the good news it was indeed cheaper, needing less hardware (from their prospective at least) but it was still mostly a closed environment.

Enter Skype
About this time Niklas Zennström and others had just finished developing  a new file sharing protocol resulting in a music sharing service known as Kazaa. Kazaa used a peer-to-peer protocol and basically leveraged the power of the Internet to share files in simple, yet secure and innovative way. Niklas figured he could do the same thing for voice. They looked at SIP and well, that’s about all they did quickly concluding that SIP  overly complex and fundamentally was so busy being complicated, it really didn’t serve the problem of the end user (which is what any service is supposed to do).

They started Skype, which used it’s own proprietary and encrypted protocol and basically operated like a pirate on the Internet. By this time the telephone companies had gotten into the ISP business and certainly didn’t like anyone trying to take their crown jewel of voice revenues away from them. Some spent a fair amount of time trying to block Skype. A cat n’ mouse game ensued. Skype incorporated all sorts of what is effectively hacker technology to ensure your ISP couldn’t tamper easily with a Skype call.

The ‘net effect was that Skype worked, and worked well and it worked nearly all the time and we (as end users) started to adopt it. The telephone industry buried it’s head in the sand, Skype was a toy, you could call only a limited number of people and they had to talk into their computer. Who wants to talk to their computer? Well it now appears a bit more than the telephone companies thought.

Skype continued to grow and hit nearly $900m in revenues. The industry didn’t much like Skype but  ceded they would have to allow Skype their space (what’s $900m anyways).  In the telecom , acquisitions are usually made based upon a multiple of annual revenues, typically 1 to 2 times revenue is kinda of normal, so last year (2011), when Microsoft acquired Skype for $8.5 billion – the telephone companies might should have paid a tad more attention.

Just a few weeks ago, Skype announced they had achieved 40 million simultaneous online users. Truly a big number and especially impressive considering how little infrastructure Skype has to actually run this service (could you imagine how much equipment a traditional telephone company would need?). Worse, if you figure the world is a big place (it is) and seems to be turning with day and night, you realize that Skype has more than 120 million regular users. Truly impressive and HELLO are you listening?

Operators were long aware of the decline in the usage of fixed telephony and in fact were noticing that minutes of use (MoU) on their mobile networks had also started to decline. In these same sort of time period, Google introduced Google Voice and basically gave away free telephone within their Gmail application. It was now clearly apparent that the race to the bottom was well underway and the telephone companies got to ride in the first car of this roller coaster (screaming no doubt). Voice would be free or nearly free. The end of an era was upon us.

… continued

Let me step away from VoIP for a moment and discuss the intersection of some new technology and how it impacts our story.

While all of this is going on, the web world is having a similar but different type of problem. HTML, the underlying specification by which nearly everything on the web lives has undergone various revisions and gotten quite complex. In many ways, it’s similar to SIP, there is no standard HTML any more.

It is maddening today for an HTML programmer to try and create web content that looks the same across all platforms. Worse, HTML really isn’t smart about the newer devices such as tablets and smart phones.  A whole new industry was borne selling tools that helped HTML programmers develop across these multiple platforms. But these platforms cost money and further increase complexity.

Thus the industry has set out now to right a lot of the wrongs and has created HTML 5 which will require a whole new browser to be installed but likely will make it easier for programmers. HTML 5 has numerous enhancements, but for the reader looking for a short cut, here is what HTML5 offers:

• Built-in support for multimedia content
• Cleaner HMTL code (limiting the work arounds that had to be written)
• Local database storage (enabling the browser to store data locally)
• Reduced development time (some new stuff that will save programmers significant time in coding)
• Inherent support for mobile (work across all types of screen resolutions and sizes)

The unsaid thing about HTML5 is that you’ll be able to execute a lot more applications natively within the browsers without the help of a plug in or having to download an application. Now if you’re wondering whether HTML5 is ultimately bad news for Apple and it’s famed iTunes store and 100% control of how applications get on your iPhone, well, you’d be right.

.. continued

Now like so many things in life, just when you think things can’t possibly get any worse and then do, Google shows up at the party. What Google understands is that an army of ants can topple nearly anything. They basically have done this with Android. By giving away for free  various components and tools for Android, they’ve enabled millions of programmers to create all sorts of new innovative stuff. It’s only incidental that Apple gets injured or the dozen or so company who tried to charge for mobile operating system went out of business. The real goal is for Google to find new revenue streams amongst these ants.

Google decided they wanted to do the same thing for multi-media communications.

Most web developers have no clue about SIP, nor any interest for that matter. They don’t really want to know that much about what a CODEC is and whether it’s important or not. They’re comfortable with HTML, XML and Javascripts but mostly they’re comfortable with higher level API’s that enable to focus on the application and worry less about how it actually rides across the network.

Google saw this as well. But the problem is you do need to worry about CODECS and signalling and how things ride across the network. Worse, multimedia is inherently complex and requires specialized knowledge. How Google asked themselves, could they enable an army of ants to go after multimedia (which by the way includes voice).

Google’s team went searching for how to help themselves in this quest and there in the dark of Sweden they found this little company called Global IP Sound otherwise known as GIPS. GIPS was a group of extremely nerdy engineers who had developed some middleware software that understood how to deal with CODECS and signalling and all facets of how to ensure a VoIP call made it from one end of the planet to the other.

GIPS big victory was that Skype had licensed (albeit on very sweet terms) all of their software and Skype had quickly embedded this into their Skype client. The GIPS stuff is one of the main reasons Skype works and sounds 10x better than your typical telephone call.  What GIPS had accomplished was more than just science, there was a real art to what they had accomplished. In fact, there was no one else anywhere on the earth who had done more or knew more about this topic than GIPS.

Unfortunately, GIPS didn’t really have much of a business. They tried to license it to various VoIP folks. But these folks were poor for the most part and GIPS struggled for years to try and figure out whether they had a business model.

Well it didn’t take long for the Google team to find GIPS hiding in Sweden and out came the check book and GIPS was acquired for $68 million in May of 2010.

The telecom industry failed to realize that the crown jewel of the entire VoIP industry had just been acquired by someone who wasn’t necessarily very friendly towards them.

… continued

So let’s recap. VoIP is happening but happening in a fashion dictated by old guard eager to protect their outmoded industry. Skype is growing in success, but looks a whole lot like Apple, by creating a walled garden of VoIP services that they control. Google is busy promoting HTML5 as a way to kill off the app store and make the browsers the only application you need on your computer.

Google has acquired GIPS, the experts in understanding how to manage real time communications. Google quickly integrates the GIPS technology into Gmail where it becomes part of their Google voice offering. Along the way, they provide some guidance to GIPS, now Google employees, on how to improve what was the GIPS product.

Then Google does, what they’ve long done, they create a website and enable anyone to come and download the entire suite of GIPS products for FREE under an open source license, it’s called WebRTC (www.webrtc.org)

Let me detail what Google has in fact donated to WebRTC, it’s all rather low level stuff but it’s intent is to mask the underlying complexity of building a multimedia application. The programmer doesn’t need to worry about these sorts of things:

• Wideband codecs (voice & video)
• Echo cancellation
• Automatic Gain Control
• Noise reduction/suppression
• Dynamic jitter buffers
• Error concealment
• Network Traversal
• P2P protocols

These are things that you have to worry about if you’re making any type of 2-way communications work from an intelligent device (notice I didn’t say only a computer) and here Google went and made it all real easy. Now what’s glaring in all of the above is there is no mention of SIP otherwise known as the protocol telephone companies love.

WebRTC requires HTML5 to work and in fact WebRTC will simply be embedded in Chrome one afternoon sometime in the future when it automatically upgrades itself.

To emphasis, one day in the very near future your common every day browser will inherently have the ability to do 2-way communications in an intelligent fashion with no need for a plug-in, side board application or some massive amount of code to be downloaded. It will simply just be there.

.. continued