WebRTC: The slam dunk (Part 5)

Another in a series of articles describing the new emerging WebRTC initiative.

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