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How a Verizon VoLTE deployment helps WebRTC?

Chris KoehnckeChris Koehncke

20110725-VoipSurvivor-Phone-puzzleQuietly Verizon Wireless has dropped a few public messages that they will be starting deployment of VoLTE or Voice over LTE in late 2013. Verizon doesn’t do things accidentally, nor do they gently step into anything. They’re dead serious about.  They have a plan and it’s well thought out.

This means they’ve figured out how to conquer battery life issues with LTE. With no GSM network, the odds of doing a CS fallback to CDMA probably are low. This means Verizon will have to be utterly sure their LTE network is rock solid to ensure voice connectivity virtually everywhere. This is consistent with their marketing message that they have the best and most reliable network. It’s a big mission.

Some predictions:

For the world of WebRTC this is a major positive. Verizon will acknowledge that VoIP can actually work reliably over mobile networks and they’ve staked their reputation on it.  If timing is good, we should have solid WebRTC mobile browsers readily available and accepted.

While most of the noise for WebRTC has been on desktop implementations, we’ve seemed to have missed the memo that the market for PC’s is dying. Smaller devices is where the market is at. Clearly though developers are working on what’s available today. Namely desktop screens. But the real action is likely to be on the small screen and the emergence of the mid-size screen (aka the tablet) as a multi-purpose communications tool.

Like Hollywood found, you can’t simply take your big screen stuff and re-purpose it for the small screen. Thus we should look as the desktop as more of  a development platform rather than the deployed application itself. Ignoring this rule and you may find your app with no audience.

With a rock solid and high speed IP network from Verizon, the world of possibilities for WebRTC had widely opened up for various multimedia applications. Perhaps in a simple BYOD enterprise model, the corporation provides you a WebRTC voice application for all your enterprise dialing. Or on the complex side a multi-party web collab and video full on bells n’ whistle.

Whatever – this means your VoLTE enable handset will be more the capable of handling a variety of multi-tasked communications applications and sooner rather than later.