Will Proposed WebRTC Standard Change Mobile as We Know It?

By emeadows
September 26, 2012

New technology called WebRTC — also known as RTCWEB (Real Time Communication on the Web) — “is poised to send a virtual tsunami through the mobile communications industry, likely changing the landscape for a good long time,” writes Erik Lagerway for GigaOM.
The premise behind WebRTC is to put voice and video services technology inside browsers and devices so that “when a developer wants to enable voice or video calling, they can use the code that is already there,” explains Lagerway. “The only way to do that on a mobile device today is with a stand alone app, which is not easy.”
Lagerway, who co-founded Hookflash and calls himself a “serial Voice-over-IP entrepreneur,” has worked with teams that have developed voice and video apps.
He believes that “WebRTC could take a great deal of heavy lifting out of the equation for developers and end up becoming the common denominator in the new mobile network.”
“The WebRTC open standards project has been in progress for more than a year now, and there are plenty of early demos of WebRTC already,” he writes.
“I think we will likely see some production deployments of WebRTC in the next six to nine months, when Firefox and Chrome for Android support it in a production version of their browsers. And Google seems primed to deploy it to their large user base on Hangouts.”

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