News from Industry

Kamailio SIP Server v5.0.8 stable is out – a minor release including fixes in code and documentation since v5.0.7. The configuration file and database schema compatibility is preserved, which means you don’t have to change anything to update.Kamailio v5.0.8 is based on the latest version of GIT branch 5.0. We recommend those running previous 5.0.x or older versions to upgrade. There is no change that has to be done to configuration file or database structure comparing with the previous release of the v5.0 branch.Important Note: this is the last official release planned from branch 5.0, unless in a matter of a few days major regressions are discovered. The official maintained stable branches at this moment are 5.1 and 5.2. If you are still running 5.0.x, it is now highly recommended to upgrade to a maintained version.Resources for Kamailio version 5.0.8Source tarballs are available at:

• https://www.kamailio.org/pub/kamailio/5.0.8/src/

Detailed changelog:

• https://www.kamailio.org/pub/kamailio/5.0.8/ChangeLog

Download via GIT: # git clone https://github.com/kamailio/kamailio kamailio
# cd kamailio
# git checkout -b 5.0 origin/5.0Relevant notes, binaries and packages will be uploaded at:

• https://www.kamailio.org/pub/kamailio/5.0.8/

Modules’ documentation:

• https://www.kamailio.org/docs/modules/5.0.x/

What is new in 5.0.x release series is summarized in the announcement of v5.0.0:

• https://www.kamailio.org/w/kamailio-v5-0-0-release-notes/

Note: the branch 5.0 is an old stable branch. The latest stable branch is 5.2, at this time with v5.2.1 being released out of it. Be aware that you may need to change the configuration files and database structures from 5.0.x to 5.1.x or 5.2.x. See more details about the latest stable series at:

• https://www.kamailio.org/w/kamailio-v5-2-0-release-notes/

Looking forward to meeting many of you at the next Kamailio World Conference, May 6-8, 2019, in Berlin, Germany!Thanks for flying Kamailio!

We continue our tradition to offer 3 free passes to students and underrepresented people at Kamailio World Conference – thanks to the sponsors, we are able to offer them in 2019 as well. The passes cover the entire registration fee for all three days and the social networking events – costs with travel and accommodation have to be covered by the participants.Anyone enrolled in an academic activity (including master and PhD programs) as well as underrepresented people can apply for one of the passes via email to:

• conference [at] kamailioworld.com

or by contacting us via web form at:

• https://www.kamailioworld.com/k07/contact-us/

Applications done until April 15, 2019, will be selected by April 18, 2019. Afterwards, if there are still available passes, they will be allocated in the first come first served policy.The details for most of the presentations were published, the full agenda is expected to be ready in a matter of a few days. You can see more details at:

• https://www.kamailioworld.com/k07/schedule/

Looking forward to meeting many of you in Berlin, at Kamailio World 2019! If you haven’t done it yet, secure your seat now, it’s going to be another great event about open source real time communications!Post navigation

CPaaS differentiation seems to be revolving around tackling niches.

Time for another look at the world of CPaaS – Communication Platform as a Service. In January 2018, a bit over a year ago, I’ve looked at CPaaS trends for 2018. The ones there were:

1. Serverless – which didn’t really happen, at least not as a direct CPaaS offering, other than what Twilio has to offer and what Voximplant had as well
2. Omnichannel – where we see most vendors collecting channels to support, with Whatsapp being the lead noise-maker
3. Visual/IDE – ended up being a winner in 2018, with Plivo, MessageBird, Voximplant and Infobip joining Twilio. It is also now usually called “Flow”
4. Machine learning and AI – still more talk than action, but we’re moving in this direction. The whole industry is
5. AR/VR – happening, though less with the CPaaS vendors directly
6. Bots – that’s part of the omnichannel + ML/AI story. And we see instances of it done with CPaaS
7. GDPR – something that was done and somehow mostly forgotten

I’d like to look at what’s happening in CPaaS this time from a slightly different angle, which alludes itself to trends as well, but in a more nuanced way. From briefings I’ve been given this past few weeks and the announcements and stories coming out of Enterprise Connect 2019, it looks like different CPaaS vendors are settling on different target audiences and catering to different use cases and market niches.

Today CPaaS is almost synonymous to Twilio. Every player looks at what Twilio does in order to plot its own route in the market, at times, with the intended aim of disrupting Twilio and then mostly with lower price points. In other times, with trying to offer something more/better.

Then there are external players who add APIs to their platform. Usually UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service) platform. They don’t directly compete with CPaaS, but if you are purchasing a “phone system” for your enterprise from a UCaaS player, then why not use its APIs and services instead of opting for another vendor (a CPaaS vendor in this case)?

Planning on selecting a CPaaS vendor? Check out this shortlist of CPaaS vendor selection metrics:

Get the shortlist

Here are how some of the vendors in this space are trying to differentiate, pivot and/or find their niche within the CPaaS market.

Agora.io – Gaming

If you look at Agora’s blog, what you’ll find out there is a slew of posts around gaming and gaming related frameworks (Unity to be exact):

• It’s How You Play the Game: Trends at Game Developers Conference – Day 1 Recap
• Adding Voice Chat to a Multiplayer Cross-Platform Unity game
• How To: Create a Video Chat App in Unity
• Add Voice Chat to your Unity game
• (iOS) Run Video Chat within your Unity application
• (Android) Run Video Chat within your Unity application
• …

Agora offers a specific solution for gaming

Gaming is an untapped market for CPaaS.

There’s communications there of all kinds – collaboration or communications across gamers inside a game, talking before the game, streaming the game to viewers, etc.

All this communications is either developed by the gaming companies (not a lot), being catered for by specialized VoIP gaming vendors, done out of scope (using Discord, Skype, …). Rarely is it covered by a CPaaS vendor.

Somehow, for CPaaS cracking this market is really tough. Agora.io is trying to do just that, along with its other focus areas – live broadcast and social (two other tough nuts).

ECLWebRTC – Media Pipeline

The Japanese platform from NTT Communications – ECLWebRTC.

Like many of the WebRTC-first/only platforms out there, ECLWebRTC had an SFU implementation and support for various devices and browsers.

When you get to that point, one approach is to go after voice and PSTN. Another one is to add more features and increase the sizes of meetings and live broadcasts that can be supported.

ECLWebRTC decided to go after machine learning here, with the intent of letting its customers integrate and connect its media paths directly to cloud APIs. This is done using what they call Media Pipeline Factory, which feels from the looks of it like a general purpose media server.

ECLWebRTC is less known in Europe and the US, and probably not much outside of Japan either. With the Japanese market focus on automation, it makes sense that media pipeline would be a focus area for ECLWebRTC. This type of a capability is relevant elsewhere as well, but it doesn’t seem to be a priority for others yet.

Infobip – Omnichannel

I’ve had the opportunity to fiddle around with Infobip Flow recently, something that turned out to be a very pleasant experience. From Flow, it became apparent that Infobip is working hard on offering its customers an omnichannel experience. Compared to other CPaaS vendors, they seem to have the most coverage of channels:

To the above, you can add SMS and RCS and email.

Infobip Flow has another nice  quality – it is built for both inbound and outbound communications. Most of its competitors do inbound flows only.

In a world where competition may force price wars on CPaaS basic offerings of voice and SMS, adding support for omnichannel seems like a good way to limit attrition and churn and increase vendor lock-in.

RingCentral – Embeddables

RingCentral isn’t a CPaaS vendor. They offer a communication service for the enterprise. You got a company and need a way to communicate? There’s RingCentral.

What they’ve done in the past couple of years was add an API layer to some of their services. Things like pushing messages into Glip, handling phone calls, etc.

The idea is that if you need something done in an automated fashion in RingCentral you can use the API for it. In many simple cases, this might be used instead of adopting CPaaS APIs. in other cases, it is about using a single vendor or having specific integrations relevant to the RingCentral platform.

What RingCentral did was add what they call Embeddable:

“With RingCentral Embeddable, you can embed a full-featured softphone into your favorite web application for an integrated communications experience that drives productivity and ease of use without lengthy development time“

This concept of embedding a piece of code isn’t new – YouTube videos offer such a capability as well as a slew of other services out there. When it comes to communications, it is similar in nature to what TokBox has in the form of Video Chat Embeds but done at the level of users and their user accounts on RingCentral.

This definitely makes integrations of RingCentral with CRM tools a lot easier to get done, and makes it easier to non-developers to engage with them – similar to how Flow type offerings make it easier for non-developers to handle communication flows.

SignalWire – Price and Flexibility

SignalWire is an interesting proposition. It comes from the team that created and is maintaining FreeSWITCH, the leading open source framework used today by many communication providers, including some of the CPaaS vendors.

The FreeSWITCH team decided to build their own managed service (=CPaaS in this case), calling it SignalWire. Here’s a few examples of the punchy copy they have on their website:

• Advanced communications from the source
• We don’t price gouge you for carrier services like per-minute and per-message rates. Focus on what’s important to your business, not your phone bill

What they seem to be aiming for are two things: price and flexibility

Price

They offer close to whole-sale price points (at least based on the website – I haven’t gone to a price comparison on this one, though their sample pricing for the US does seem low).

To make things easier, they are targeting Twilio customers, doing that by offering TwiML support (similar to what Pilvo did/is doing). TwiML is a markup language for Twilio, which can be used to control what happens on connected calls. Continuing with the blunt approach, SignalWire calls this LāML – Legacy Antiquated Markup Language.

While this may fit a certain type of Twilio customers, it certainly doesn’t cover the whole gamut of Twilio services today.

Flexibility

On the flexibility front, there’s mostly marketing messages today and not any real announced products on the SignalWire website.

Besides LāML there’s a WebSocket based client API/SDK, not so different than what you’ll find elsewhere.

They can probably get away with it in the sales process by saying “we give you FreeSWITCH from the source”, but I am not sure what happens when developers want to configure that elastic cloud service the way they are used to be doing with their own FreeSWITCH installation.

All in all, this is an interesting offering and an interesting approach and go to market.

TeleSign – Security and Data Analytics

TeleSign is focused on SMS. And a bit of voice. As their website states: “APIs Delivering User Verification, Data Insights & Communications”

Since security, verification and fraud prevention these days rely heavily on analytics, TeleSign are “horeding” data about phone numbers, using it for these use cases. It isn’t that others don’t do it (there’s Twilio Authy, nexmo Number Insight and others), but this is what they are putting front and center.

Since their acquisition by BICS, a wholesale operator for wireline and wireless carries, that has grown even further, as they gain access to more and more data.

It will be interesting to see how TeleSign grows their business from security to additional communication domains, or will they try to focus on security and expand from the telecom space to adjacent areas.

Twilio – Adjacencies

Talking about adjacencies, that’s what Twilio is doing. Now that they are a public company, there is even more insatiability for growth within Twilio, in an effort to find more revenue streams. So far, this has worked great for Twilio.

Here are two areas we’ve seen Twilio going into:

1. Contact centers, shifting away from developers per se with their CPaaS platform towards a cloud based contact center offering, competing head to head with some of their own customers (that would be Twilio Flex)
2. Email, through the acquisition of SendGrid

How email fits into the Twilio communication APIs is still an open question, though I can see a few interesting initiatives there.

And then there’s the wireless offering of Twilio, which resembles a more flexible M2M play.

But where would Twilio go next?

UCaaS, going after unified communications vendors and competing with them head to head?

Maybe try to jump towards an Intercom like service of its own? Or purchase Intercom?

Or find another market of developers that is growing nicely – similar maybe to its recent Stripe integration of Twilio Pay.

Twilio in a way has been defining and redefining what CPaaS is for the past several years. They need to continue doing that to stay in the lead and well ahead of their competition.

VoIP Innovations – Marketplace

VoIP Innovations came out with what they call Showroom.

Here’s a short video of the explanation of what that is exactly:

Many of the CPaaS vendors offer a partner program of sorts. This is where vendors who develop stuff for others or build tooling and apps on top of the CPaaS vendor’s APIs can go and showcase their work. The programs vary from CPaaS company to another.

Twilio has Showcase as well as an add-on marketplace of sorts. Nexmo has a partners directory. VoIP Innovations are banking on their showroom.

What makes it different a bit is the target audience associated with it:

1. Developers – obvious, as CPaaS caters first and foremost for developers
2. Resellers – who can pick off marketplace apps, whitelabel and resell them
3. Subscribers – who pay for that privilege

While there isn’t much documentation to go about, I am assuming that the whole intent behind the marketplace is to offer direct monetization opportunities for developers and resellers by taking care of customer acquisition as well as payment on behalf of the developer and reseller.

A concept taken from other marketplaces (think mobile app stores). It will be intersting to see how successful this will be.

Vonage – UCaaS+CPaaS

Vonage is interesting. Started as consumer VoIP, turned cloud UC vendor (=enterprise communications) through acquisitions, turned to acquire Nexmo and then TokBox to add CPaaS, continued with NewVoiceMedia acquisition to cover contact center space.

How does one differentiate in such a way? Probably by leveraging synergies across its product offerings and markets.

What Vonage recently did was bring number programmability from its Nexmo/CPaaS offering to its VBC/UCaaS platform.

What do they gain?

1. Single API across product lines, making it easier to learn and use the same APIs
2. Large ecosystem of developers using Nexmo able to build on VBC – it is… the same API
3. The level of flexibility that a CPaaS platform has right on top of a UCaaS offering. In this case, scripting using Nexmo NCCO

Is this good for Nexmo customers and partners? Yap. They can now reach out to the Vonage business customers as an additional target market.

Is this good for Vonage customers and partners? Yap. They can now do more, and more customized communications solutions with this added flexibility.

Voximplant – Flow

Voximplant is one of the lesser known CPaaS vendors. Its whole platform is built on the concept of an App Engine, where you write the communications logic right onto their platform using Java Script. It is serverless from the ground up. A year or two ago, Voximplant added Smartcalls. A product that enables you to sketch out call flows for outbound interactions – marketing, sales, etc. These interactions would be played out across a large number of phone numbers and get automated, making it really easy and flexible to drive phone based campaigns.

Now? Voximplant took the next step of adding inbound interactions, covering the IVR and contact center types of scenarios.

Twilio, MessageBird and Plivo offer inbound visual flow products. These allow developers to drag and drop communication widgets to build a flow – a customer interaction through the system.

Voximplant and Infobip offer inbound and outbound flows, where you can also plot company/agent based initiatives with greater ease as well as the customer initiated interactions.

Why aren’t you listed here?

The CPaaS market is large and varied. It is hard to see everyone all the time. It is also hard to innovate and differentiate every year. The vendors here are the ones I had briefings with or ones who promoted their products in ways that were visible to me. But more than anything, these are the ones that I felt have changed their offerings in the past year in a differentiating manner.

BTW – if you think that differentiation here means that it is a functionality that other vendors don’t have then you are wrong. Doing that is close to impossible today. Differentiation is simply where each vendor is putting his focus and trying to attract customers and carve his niche within the broader market. It is the stories each vendor tells about his product.

If you feel like a vendor needs to be here, or did something meaningful and interesting, just contact me. I am always happy to learn more about what is happening in the market.

Who is missing in my WebRTC PaaS report?

Later this month, I will be releasing my latest update of the WebRTC PaaS report.

There are changes taking place in the market, and what vendors are offering in the WebRTC space as a managed API service is also changing. This report is there to guide buyers and sellers in the market on what to do.

For buyers, it is about which platform to pick for their project – or in some cases, in which of the platform vendors to invest.

For sellers, it is about what to add to their roadmap. To understand how they are viewed from the outside and how do they compare to their peers.

Here’s who’s been in the last update of the report:

Think you should be there? Contact me.

Want to purchase the report? There’s a 30% discount on it from today and until the update gets published (and yes – you will be receiving the update once it gets published for no additional fee).

There will be a new appendix in the report, covering the topic of Flow and Embeddable trends in the market. Something that will become more important as we move forward.

The post CPaaS differentiation in 2019 appeared first on BlogGeek.me.

Luis Martin Gil from zaleos.net has published a blog detailing how to create a new module for Kamailio using C++. Although Kamailio is written in C, sometimes C++ can be a more convenient programming language for a module, especially if it needs to link against an external C++ library. Another useful benefit can be the ability to use existing unit testing frameworks. These and other benefits are detailed in the article published at:

• https://blog.zaleos.net/kamailio-cpp-module/

It is a very good reading, no matter you want to use C++ or C for extending Kamailio.A couple of years ago, Luis has authored the ndb_cassandra module for Kamailio and has contributed to other modules along the years.Should you be the author or just be aware of any online tutorial about Kamailio that worth sharing with the community, just contact us. We will be more than happy to publish a news about it.Meanwhile, we hope to see many of you at the next Kamailio World Conference, May 6-8, 2019, in Berlin, Germany!

This demo of the Microsoft Surface Hub 2 is pretty damn cool…

I don’t run a lot of Microsoft product anymore, switched to mac when the intel chip landed + Apple moved to a unix underpinning. That said, I have seen much better quality in products coming from Microsoft in the last few years, so maybe they deserve a second look.

Surface Hub 2 sort of reminds me of a product called Perch, built a by a local Vancouver team which was meant to serve as a portal into disparate global offices. Perch was way before it’s time. WebRTC was still in its infancy and personal device video conferencing had not really crossed the chasm, which is a shame considering where we are today.

Now there are many of video conferencing companies and products, and plenty of alternatives / platforms for developers to build on. It certainly seems plausible now that we could see the Microsoft Surface Hub 2 in boardrooms across the globe. Apparently it will be interoperable with WebRTC endpoints as well, which could make this a powerful work tool indeed. That would enable collaboration with peers over IP on various endpoints including laptops, tablets and mobile, regardless of the OS. Sharing product ideas, riffing on concepts and polishing final features on a product release using the Microsoft Surface Hub 2 as a tool, could be a refreshing new way to work.

It will be interesting to see what developments come about from the Microsoft press event in NYC in April, as reported by The Verge.

 

I haven’t blogged here in some time, so I figured that since the topic is relevant this would be good a good opportunity to dust off the old blog (webrtc.is / sipthat.com) and post something we have been working on at SignalWire. I am quite passionate about WebRTC and real-time communications so it’s great to be helping bring it to life at SignalWire!

We all know and love <cough> SIP, so we decided we would enable the use of SIP over WebSockets at SignalWire. This new offer also enables functionality like WebRTC with SIP over WebSockets.

This means our customers can now use off the shelf JS libraries, like JSSIP to create basic web experiences for their users, powered by SignalWire. It used to be a bit of a PITA, to create services that provided users with seamless online communications. Now it’s a breeze, and when using SignalWire it’s also very affordable.

For now, we are enabling basic calling and video capabilities, the advanced functionality (including video conferencing) will come in conjunction with a future release of a SignalWire RELAY JS library.

Personally, I can’t wait to see what creative minds will build using this technology with SignalWire on the backend.

If you want to know more about SignalWire’s new WebRTC + SIP over WebSockets offer, you can read about it on the SignalWire product blog.

WebRTC doesn’t really connect people, but the way you think about it signaling is important to your WebRTC application.

Here’s a comment left on one of my recent articles:

WebRTC is… still just a little confusing…Tsahi, i’m reading the book recommended by Loreto & Romano but the examples are outdated. With regards to the SDP signal – if peer A is on a webRTC application, but peer B is surfing youtube – How does peer B get notified of an offer? It would have to go to peer B’s email address right? — because there is no way of knowing peer B’s IP address. Please help.

A few quick things before I dig deeper into this WebRTC connectivity thing:

• Yap. WebRTC is a little confusing. Maybe even a lot. It doesn’t behave like any other browser technology we have
• The sad thing about books about WebRTC is that they didn’t age all too well. WebRTC still changes too fast
• There’s some confusion here in wording – peers, offer, etc.

How well do you know WebRTC? Check it out in my online WebRTC quiz.

Take the WebRTC quiz

Connecting, Signaling and WebRTC

I’ll try to use a kind of a bad comparison here to try to explain this.

Let’s say you are the proud owners of a Pilates studio. You’re the instructor there (#truestory – at least for my wife).

My wife gives Pilates lessons at different hours of the day. These are private lessons so it is rather flexible on both sides. But let me ask you this – how do people know when to come for a lesson?

This being Israel, they usually communicate with my wife via Whatsapp to decide together on the date and time. Usually, people stick to the day of week and time and start communicating only if they can’t make it, want to reschedule or just make sure the lesson is still taking place.

Back to WebRTC.

WebRTC is that Pilates studio. It does one thing – enables live media to flow from one browser to another. Sometimes also non-browsers, but let’s stick to the basics here.

How do the people who need to share or receive that live media connect to each other? That’s not what WebRTC does – it happens somewhere else. And that somewhere is the signaling mechanism that you pick for your own application. I am calling it a mechanism and not a protocol, since it is going to be a tad more confusing in a second.

Or not.

Now let’s go back to WebRTC, signaling and connecting people and look at it from a point of view of different scenarios.

Scheduled Meeting

We’ll start with a scheduled meeting. At any given point in time, I have a few of those coming up. Meetings with clients, partners and potential clients. Here’s one such calendar invitation:

This one happens to take place using Google Meet. Who’s calling who? No one really. I’ll just click that link in the invite when the time comes and magically find myself in the same conference with the other participants.

In most scheduled conferences, you just join a WebRTC link

Where do you get that link to use?

• Inside the calendar invite
• In an email that was sent
• Through an SMS reminder

Some of these services allow inviting people from inside the meeting. That ends up being sent to them via email or an SMS as a link or just dialing their phone (without WebRTC).

Ad-hoc “upgrade” of text chat to video conference

There are ad-hoc calls. These usually start from a chat message.

Often times, I’d rather text chat than do a voice or a video call. It has to do with the speed and asynchronous nature of text. Which means that I’ll be chatting with someone over whatever instant messaging service we select, and at some point, I might want to switch medium – move from text to something a bit more synchronous like video:

Like this example with Philipp – most of our conversations start in Hangouts (that’s where he is most reachable to me) and when needed, we’ll just jump on a call, without planning it first.

Who is calling whom here? Does it matter?

What happens here is that both of us are already “inside” the communications app, so we both have a direct link to the service. Passing that information from one side to the other is a no brainer at this point.

So how will that get signaled? However you see fit. Probably on top of a Websocket or over HTTPS.

I am calling you on the “phone”

What if there’s nothing pre-planned, so it isn’t a scheduled meeting. And we haven’t really been on a text chat to warm things up towards a call. How do you reach me now?

How do you “dial”?

Puneet is one of our support/testing engineers at testRTC. While he will usually text me over slack to start a call, he might just try calling directly from time to time.

What happens then?

I am not in front of my laptop with the Slack app opened. My phone is on standby mode. How does it start ringing on me? What does WebRTC do to get my attention?

Nothing.

The phone starts dialing because it received a mobile push notification. I’ve got the Slack app installed, so it can receive push notifications. Slack invoked a push notification to wake up the app and make it “ring” for me.

The same can be done with web notifications. And there are probably other means to do similar things in IOT devices. The thing is – this is out of scope for WebRTC, but something that is doable with the signaling technologies available to you.

Contact center agent answering calls

When a contact center adopts WebRTC to be able to migrate its agents from using desktop phones or installed softphone towards WebRTC, calls will end up being received in the browser.

This happens by integrating callbars inside CRMs or just by having the CRM implement the contact center part of the equation as well.

What happens then? How do calls get dialed? (the above is a screenshot taken from Talkdesk’s support site)

They go through PSTN towards a PBX. More often than not, that PBX will be based on Asterisk or FreeSWITCH, though other alternatives exist. PBXs usually base themselves around the SIP protocol, which will lead to two alternatives on the signaling protocol that will be used by WebRTC in the browser:

1. SIP over Websocket. Practically the same thing happening in SIP will happen on the browser
2. Some proprietary protocol will be used, translated from SIP

In both cases, the contact center agent is registered in advance. It is also marked as “available” in most contact center software logic – this means that incoming calls waiting in the call center queue can be routed to that agent. So it is sitting and waiting for incoming calls. In some ways, this is similar to the upgrade from text chat scenario.

Connecting? WebRTC?

When it comes to actual users, WebRTC doesn’t get them “connected”. At least not from a signaling point of view.

What WebRTC does is negotiate the paths that the media will use throughout the session. That’s the “offer-answer” (or JSEP) messages that pass between one WebRTC entity to another. And even that isn’t sent by WebRTC itself – WebRTC creates the blob of data it wants to send and lets your application send it in any way you see fit.

Still confused? There’s a course for that – my online WebRTC training. The first module (out of eight modules) is free, so go learn about WebRTC.

Get a WebRTC training

The post How does WebRTC connect people? appeared first on BlogGeek.me.

WebRTC wins over competition because there is no competition – browsers offer only WebRTC as a technology for web developers.

It was raining and miserable this last Saturday. I had lost of ideas for articles to write for BlogGeek.me in my backlog, but none of them really inspired me to action. The 8yo went to his cousin. The wife had her own things to do. My 11yo daughter was bored to death. She comes to me and says: “Can we do a trip outside to the park? I need some fresh air.” How could I answer besides saying yes?

The rain stopped a bit, so we went outside. What she really wanted wasn’t fresh air, but a chaperone to the closest candy vending machine. They are having a game at school for Purim, where she needs to bring small presents and candies to another kid in her class without her knowing who is pampering her. She needed an extra candy.

How is this related to WebRTC? It isn’t.

When I asked her about her plans for this game, she mentioned the trinket she planned on giving today –

2 mechanical pencils.

And that’s definitely WebRTC related.

A quick conversation ensued between me and my daughter – are these 0.5 mm or 0.7 mm point type? My daughter went to explain that it might even be 0.9 mm.

So many alternatives.

Competing standards

It got me thinking:

With analog video recording we had VHS and Betamax.

Paper size? A4 and Letter.

Power frequency? 50 Hz and 60 Hz.

With VoIP signaling we had H.323 and SIP. And also XMPP.

Audio and video codecs? A shopping mall of alternatives.

Web browser streaming? HLS and MPEG-DASH.

Inches and Meters. Left side vs right side driver in cars.

The list is endless.

WebRTC standard

But browser based real time media communications?

WebRTC.

There. Is. No. Other. Alternative.

We had that short romance around ORTC, which ended with ORTC dead and its main concepts just wrapped back into WebRTC.

What other technology would you use or could you use inside a browser to do a video call?

Nothing.

Just WebRTC.

The other alternatives just don’t cure it (including what Zoom is presumably doing).

• You want to build a real time service
• It needs to run in the browser
• You use WebRTC

What does that mean exactly? It gives us a kind of a virtuous circle.

• You want to build a real time service
• Looking at alternatives, you find WebRTC
• There’s a vibrant community around it (because of web browsers)
• Alternatives are limited proprietary solutions or old open source
• You pick WebRTC
• Adding to its popularity, adoption and ecosystem

For the most part, there’s no question if you should select WebRTC these days. There’s also no question what are the alternatives (there usually are none). It isn’t a question if WebRTC is getting adopted, used, growing or popular.

When our window to the world is the browser, then WebRTC is what you use.

For mobile apps or other devices, the need for browsers or just having an ecosystem around the technology picked translates again to WebRTC.

Thinking of using real time media technology? That’s synonymous to WebRTC.

Want to learn more about WebRTC? Check out the first module of my online course – it is free.

Start learning WebRTC

The post Why is WebRTC winning over its (non)competition? appeared first on BlogGeek.me.

Time is flying fast, only about 8 weeks till the start of the 7th edition of Kamailio World Conference, happening again in Berlin, Germany, during May 6-8, 2019! The details for the most of accepted presentations are published, the full schedule to be made available in the near future.Besides bringing a consistent group for distinguished speakers, with every edition we aim to improve the interaction between all the participants. From the first edition of the event we had the VUC Visions panel and Dangerous Demos, along with the cocktail party for social networking. At the previous edition we introduced the Ask Me Anything session with Kamailio core developers.In 2019, we are adding two new sessions to offer even more chances that the participants know each other and network between them, opening the doors for partnerships and collaboration. These are:

• Your Deployment On Stage – 5 Minutes 5 Slides – the session is coordinated by Markus Monka, head of IT infrastructure at sipgate.de. In this session any participant can come in the front of the others and speak about how they use Kamailio or what they are offering in the VoIP/RTC space. Think of it as a quick exposure, letting the others notice your presence so they can approach during the breaks or social networking event for further discussions. Time is limited, the proposals will be accepted in the order they are received. You can contact us starting now and get your 5min — use the web form for it. Important note: this session is not for accepted speakers, but for the registered attendees.
• Berlin City Tour By Boat – with special credits to sipgate.de for sponsoring it, this new social networking event during the evening of May 6, 2019, aims to offer a relaxing time combine sightseeing in the beautiful city center of Berlin with enjoying a few drinks, overall enabling more chances to chat between us.

Looking forward to meeting many of you in Berlin at Kamailio World Conference 2019! You still have the chance to secure your seat now at the early registration fee:

• https://www.kamailioworld.com/k07/registration/

Ending the post with a big shut out to sipgate.de, a company that supported all our editions and even more events related to Kamailio project! They are also hiring VoIP engineers, and not only — you have the opportunity to join an amazing team in Dusseldorf, Germany.

Kamailio SIP Server v5.2.2 stable is out – a minor release including fixes in code and documentation since v5.2.1. The configuration file and database schema compatibility is preserved, which means you don’t have to change anything to update.Kamailio® v5.2.2 is based on the latest source code of GIT branch 5.2 and it represents the latest stable version. We recommend those running previous 5.2.x or older versions to upgrade. There is no change that has to be done to configuration file or database structure comparing with the previous releases of the v5.2 branch.Resources for Kamailio version 5.2.2Source tarballs are available at:

• https://www.kamailio.org/pub/kamailio/5.2.2/src/

Detailed changelog:

• https://www.kamailio.org/pub/kamailio/5.2.2/ChangeLog

Download via GIT: # git clone https://github.com/kamailio/kamailio kamailio
# cd kamailio
# git checkout -b 5.2 origin/5.2Relevant notes, binaries and packages will be uploaded at:

• https://www.kamailio.org/pub/kamailio/5.2.2/

Modules’ documentation:

• https://www.kamailio.org/docs/modules/5.2.x/

What is new in 5.2.x release series is summarized in the announcement of v5.2.0:

• https://www.kamailio.org/w/kamailio-v5-2-0-release-notes/

Do not forget about the next Kamailio World Conference, taking place in Berlin, Germany, during May 6-8, 2019. A selection of sessions has been published! The registration is open, secure your seat now!Thanks for flying Kamailio!

I know I am. I am constantly surprised what people are doing with WebRTC.

Here’s something I hear a lot:

How do you make a call with WebRTC?

Well… you don’t. Not really. And in many scenarios – that term call, or dialing, or answering – has no real meaning.

Here’s a funny opposite for you:

Kids in front of old phones don’t know what to do. It isn’t “natural”. Guess what? Nothing is. The things that are natural to you are things you’ve learned, and are now used to. They are a set of rules in your upbringing.

If you come from a VoIP background, then WebRTC brings with it quite a challenge to your world. I know – I had 13 years of VoIP background before WebRTC was announced. Since that announcement, I’ve been surprised time and again by what people are doing with WebRTC. Especially people who shouldn’t be able to even use it because they don’t know VoIP enough.

Coming from VoIP? Interested in streaming? Broadcasting? Some other communication use cases? Tomorrow I am hosting a free webinar – Google Does Gaming: WebRTC Man-to-Machine Use Cases

Register to the webinar

When we all first started out in this adventure called WebRTC, what we’ve seen was video calling. It was all about face to face meetings. It took time to think about WebRTC in other settings and for other use cases.

And here we are. Years later, dealing with WebRTC in the aid of cloud gaming. Google used WebRTC in Project Stream, where they showcased playing the game Spartan through a web browser – the game itself was rendered in Google’s cloud.

(that’s a screenshot of one of my slides for tomorrow’s webinar)

Who would have thought WebRTC would be used for that?

Anyways, if you come from a VoIP background, here are some aspects of WebRTC you’ll need to unlearn and relearn – I am still grappling with them myself every once in awhile:

Signaling? What’s “Signaling”?

With any other VoIP protocol out there, it seems like we’re starting off with signaling.

H.323? Signaling.

SIP? That’s signaling.

XMPP? Ditto.

WebRTC? Nope. No signaling. Sorry.

What does that mean exactly? That you can use whatever signaling mechanism/protocol you see fit. That’s assuming you can get it to run inside a web browser or wherever it is your application needs to operate.

SIP, which is the most popular VoIP signaling protocol out there, is probably an overkill for a lot of WebRTC services. I tend to look at it as a hindrance when I see it in architectures – I often ask time and again why is it there to make sure there’s a real need other than saying someone needed signaling for his WebRTC application.

You. Don’t. Answer. Calls.

There’s no such thing as a call while we’re at it.

I remember doing a live WebRTC training a couple of years back. I had to hammer out of the people the need to ask incessant questions about dial, answer, mute, hold and a bunch of other paradigms they thought are golden rules in communications.

If you feel that way too, then look at that video at the top of this article again. What made sense 20 years ago doesn’t hold water today.

WebRTC isn’t fixed in any specific concept of how “calls” are made. I prefer using the term session and deal with the initiation part of it on a case by case basis.

If there’s no need for dialing or answering – just don’t force it on your WebRTC solution.

It isn’t only Google

Most days of the week, I like thinking of WebRTC as the source code that resides on webrtc.org. That’s the codebase Google is maintaining and putting inside its Chrome browser.

The thing is, many end up modifying it for their own needs. They:

• Port it over to mobile
• Fix private bugs in it
• Add their own minor modifications to it where needed
• Seriously change it (check out what Discord did)
• Modify the Chromium version, replace it inside Electron and release their own stuff

There are some really interesting “mods” to the vinyl WebRTC implementations out there, usually held privately for internal use of companies. In many ways, this is a shortcut to building your own media engine from scratch.

There’s more than one way

What I like about WebRTC is that usually, there’s a single way of doing things with it: everything is encrypted – you can’t override that; it defaults to multiplex and bundle its media connections; the list goes on.

How you use it is a totally different story.

Each SFU implementation is different than the other. There are different ways to record a session. Different ideas and approaches to broadcasting at low latency.

The “right” answer differs a lot not only based on the use case, but also on the business model, the developers available, the DNA of the company, etc.

Wasteful can be just fine

There’s also a school of thought that never really existed with VoIP: the “good enough” approach – one where we’re just fine with not optimizing everything and leaving things it a kind of a mediocre stage that is good enough for what we’re trying to do. It may eat up to much bandwidth or tax on the CPU. Or just not be how things are done around here. But it works. Good enough.

Heck – the default WebRTC implementation does it on its own, deciding to waste 1.7Mbps for a VGA resolution encoding instead of limiting it to 800kbps or less. Such a waste of good resources.

I learned to love this approach (and then try to optimize it with my clients).

How do you think about WebRTC?

What about you?

What mistakes you see people make when thinking about WebRTC that fits the web or VoIP better?

What things do you need to unlearn about WebRTC?

Coming from VoIP? Interested in streaming? Broadcasting? Some other communication use cases? Tomorrow I am hosting a free webinar – Google Does Gaming: WebRTC Man-to-Machine Use Cases

Register to the webinar

The post Are you blocked by the rules of your upbringing in your WebRTC application? appeared first on BlogGeek.me.

Thanks to work initiated by Google Project Zero, fuzzing has become a popular topic within WebRTC since late last year.  It was clear WebRTC was lacking in this area. However, the community has shown its strength by giving this topic an immense amount of focus and resolving many issues.  In a previous post, we showed how to break the Janus Server RTCP parser. The Meetecho team behind Janus did not take that lightly. They got to the bottom of what turned out to be quite a big project.

Continue reading How Janus Battled libFuzzer and Won (Alessandro Toppi) at webrtcHacks.

To discuss about the next major release of Kamailio (v5.3.0) and ongoing development, we propose an IRC devel meeting for next week, on Monday, March 11, 2019.The meeting is going to be held as usual in the #kamailio channel on freenode.net IRC network.A wiki page was created to collect the topics that are wanted to be discussed:

• https://www.kamailio.org/wiki/devel/irc-meetings/2019a

Fell free to add there or reply to the mailing list with what you think it is relevant to discuss.Thanks for flying Kamailio!

Slightly more than 2  months till the start of the 7th edition of Kamailio World Conference, the event is approaching at a fast pace!Recently we published the details for a group of accepted speakers, today we made a selection of sessions at the Kamailio World 2019. You can head to the Schedule page and see the details for about 20 sessions, from both workshops and conference days:

• https://www.kamailioworld.com/k07/schedule/

A very diverse range of topics, from using Kamailio to secure your VoIP services, deploying in a containerized environment with Docker and Kubernetes, using RTPEngine or the new addition RTP Media Server module, optimizations for KEMI language scripting such as Lua, Python or Javascript, to blockchains in telephony, building high throughput SBC systems with topos, using Kamailio and FreeSwitch together, or latest updates from Asterisk PBX.There will be sessions covering IMS/VoLTE and IoT, and, of course, we have the very popular two sessions that never missed a Kamailio World edition: Dangerous Demos with James Body and VUC Visions with Randy Resnick.The open discussions session Kamailio – Ask Me Anything with the main developers or the project is again present and allows the attendees to address questions about their needs of using Kamailio and the development of the project.A new kind of session is introduced at this edition Your Deployment On Stage – 5 Minutes 5 Slides enabling attendees to show what their are doing in the RTC space, what are their services and products, where and how Kamailio is used.The details for other speakers and sessions will be published in the near future, stay tuned!Do not miss Kamailio World Conference 2019, it is going to be another great edition! You can register now!

• https://www.kamailioworld.com/k07/registration/

Looking forward to meeting many of you at the next Kamailio World Conference, during May 6-8, 2019, in Berlin, Germany!

Some believe WebRTC isn’t ready. I think it is ready. But when will WebRTC 1.0 be available?

Ready or not, WebRTC is here. The thing is, we still don’t have a closed standard specification we can all print and take on a plane to read for our enjoyment. There are drafts – but nothing that is final.

And once final, does it mean that it is available?

There are 3 parts that needs to be addressed to answer this question. I’ll deal with only two of them (skipping the IETF one):

1. When will the relevant WebRTC draft become IETF RFC
2. When will the relevant WebRTC draft become W3C recommendation
3. When will browsers implement the new specification

Want to learn more about WebRTC, the various components in its specification and what compute power you need for each WebRTC server? Try out my free video course:

Learn about WebRTC servers

Want to learn more about WebRTC, the various components in its specification and what compute power you need for each WebRTC server? Try out my free video course:

WebRTC standardization

WebRTC as a standard is built out of two components:

1. What goes on over the network – that’s what the IETF is working on
2. What APIs can developers use on top of a web browser – that’s what the W3C is working on

Most of the industry is already viewing WebRTC as a done deal – so much so that the IETF already has an RFC for SIP over WebSocket. The only reason to have such an RFC is to be able to use SIP inside a browser, and the only way to use SIP inside a browser with media being sent or received would be by way of WebRTC. The people working at the IETF were so certain WebRTC will get an RFC of its own in 2014 already (5 years ago!).

Each of these organizations has its own set of rules, policies, governance and flow.

I’ve tried to keep the standardization of WebRTC at arm’s length. In the past I’ve been part of standardization processes related to H.323 and 3G-324M, going to ITU-T and 3GPP standardization meetings as well as acting as a co-chair of the 3G-324M activity group at the IMTC (dealing with interoperability). It is a tedious work that combines technology with politics. As fun as it is (at times at least), dealing with it as an employee of a company is different than doing it as a consultant. The value for me just wasn’t there.

For vendors? If you want to take a driver’s seat at this, and decide what gets more attention, then you should invest time in it.

But where are we with WebRTC then?

W3C WebRTC status

I’ve asked Dominique Hazael-Massieux about WebRTC’s status. He works as a W3C Staff dealing with WebRTC. Here’s what I got –

When it comes to W3C, where the browser WebRTC APIs are being defined, WebRTC is considered to be at the CR stage.

CR means a Candidate Recommendation. We’ve moved from a Working Draft (WD) towards a Candidate Recommendation.

Next up would be PR – Proposed Recommendation, and from there, a Recommendation.

How do we move to the next step?

1. First the draft needs to be finalized. There are some open issues that needs to be closed for that to happen (at the time of writing this, there were 53 open issues)
2. All the features written in the draft need to be implemented in two independent browsers (this is kinda tricky now that Chrome is gobbling up the market). More on browser implementations later
3. It needs to be tested for interoperability across browsers. So tests needs to be written to validate that

That first one is “easy”. Get the people writing the spec into a room. Have them agree. Then have someone write down the agreement on “paper”. Get everyone to read it. And agree again. Rinse and repeat. It’s never easy.

That second one of implementing in browsers? That’s also not easy. They have other things on their minds as well. And WebRTC is pretty darn complex to implement. But we’re getting there.

That third one of interoperability testing? With a test suite. That tests for the various features? This is downright suicidal. And daunting.

All that work needs to be done for “free”. There’s no direct money to be made out of it. But lost of hours needs to be spent by many people to get it done. We’re getting there, but we’re not there yet.

WebRTC 1.0 browser implementation

And then there are the browser implementations.

The specification is as good as its implementations. People always complain when I suggest following the Chrome behavior in WebRTC as opposed to implementing against the specification. That’s where theory and expectations meets reality.

At the end of the day, your service will need to:

1. Run inside web browsers; and/or
2. Integrate/port/embed a WebRTC SDK in your app

In the first case, Chrome wins on market share; Microsoft Edge will be migrating to Chromium. And for most use cases, Chrome is the first browser to target anyway.

In the second case, if you are using the code in webrtc.org for your app, then you are effectively basing your app on Chrome’s WebRTC implementation.

Better go with what’s available now than what will be ready some time in the future.

In the past, the changes we’ve seen in browser implementations of WebRTC revolved a lot around media optimizations and interoperability across browsers. What we are seeing now a lot more is changes in the API layer, where browsers are shifting towards the WebRTC 1.0 specification. This is necessary because:

• Without spec compliant implementations we can’t move WebRTC from CR to PR
• People still (rightfully) expect to have the specification implemented by browser vendors
• It is about time…

These changes mean one sad thing though. You can be certain in one thing – during 2019, WebRTC implementations in browsers is going to break existing apps multiple times. This is due to the changes taking place. We are seeing migration from Plan B towards Unified Plan, modifications to the connection state machine, and an experimental implementation of mDNS. There’s more that I probably forgot and more ahead of us still.

The only certainty is that nothing is certain. You’ll need to continue investing in aligning with the browser implementations with each and every browser version release.

When then?

The current intent is to be able to get to the PR stage for WebRTC somewhere in Q3 2019. Will it be postponed further? I don’t really know.

Interestingly, work has started in parallel about WebRTC NV – what comes next. I’ve covered the WebAssembly in WebRTC part of it in the past.

Want to learn more about WebRTC, the various components in its specification and what compute power you need for each WebRTC server? Try out my free video course:

Learn about WebRTC servers

The post When will WebRTC 1.0 be available? appeared first on BlogGeek.me.

Via social media media, I noticed a nice article about a Kamailio exporter for Prometheus written in Golang:

• https://blog.callr.tech/kamailio-exporter-for-prometheus/

So I thought sharing it further via Kamailio’s website. Lately I noticed an increase of interest on using Prometheus, hopefully this exporter tool will help others inside our community.As a matter of fact, one of the submissions for the next Kamailio World Conference (May 608, 2019, in Berlin) is about using Prometheus with Kamailio for visualising statistics and other metrics via Grafana dashboards (to avoid any confusions, it is not from the author of the linked article in this text). The schedule of the event is expected to be published in the near future, meanwhile you can view a selection of accepted speakers. Early bird registration is still open, if you want to benefit of the discounted access, hurry up to register!Thanks for flying Kamailio!

WebRTC is a great piece of technology, assuming you can develop a coherent strategy on how you plan on using it.

There are two extremes happening in the enterprise communication space, and they are quite opposite in nature. On one hand, companies are striving towards more automation and this is coming to their contact centers by way of machine learning and bots “replacing” humans. On the other hand, many of us are striving for better and more meaningful communications. Be it for long distance relationships (personal as well as business ones) or by the use of machine learning (again) and context, to guide us through an interaction – being able to know beforehand the intents of people for example.

Enter WebRTC, which enables communications to take place anywhere – be it a mobile application, a physical device or a modern web browser. What WebRTC brings with it is better context of sessions and lower barrier of entry for enterprises to make use if this technology. Some enterprises use it to improve business agility or lower their operating costs. Others use it to create new businesses never before seen or to improve the communications with their customers or peers in the industry.

We are now 7-8 years since the announcement of WebRTC (depends on who’s doing the counting and from which date), but in many ways, a lot of enterprises (I don’t want to say most) have failed in to capture the value they initially envisioned from using WebRTC. In many cases, the lack of any thoughtful strategy created a rush towards initiatives that never really matured.

Through my work with many clients on their WebRTC initiatives along with discussions with many others on their projects and services – failed as well as successful ones, I’ve seen a few challenges that crop up consistently across such initiatives.

#1 – Where to begin?

WebRTC is a versatile and powerful building block in your arsenal. This means that you can do a lot with it. That range of utility can be overwhelming, oftentimes leading to wasted resources. The other problem is that WebRTC can’t do everything, while the expectations of it are rather high. This leads to requirements and plans that are often not grounded in what can be done in reality or within the allocated budget and resources.

Deciding what to build using WebRTC requires an understanding of the capabilities and limitations of WebRTC coupled with a clear view of the communication problems you are trying to solve for your customers. There’s a lot of feature creep happening when it comes to WebRTC. I find myself asked about a simple video chat service for 2 people, but once you dig a layer deeper, you see requirements for group video calls, recording and even broadcasts as part of the project. Being able to see the full picture, and map it back into requirements and a roadmap comprised out of multiple phases is an important first step in any WebRTC initiative.

There are a few other things to keep in mind –

Integration with existing infrastructure

Oftentimes, you’d be planning on adding WebRTC to an existing service. This can happen in many ways:

• A chat application that gets voice/video interactions as an additional feature
• An existing telephony/communication service that needs to get guest access via the web browser
• Just a regular self service application with a new option to connect to the contact center via the application itself (instead of using expensive 1-800 numbers)

This requires extra care in how WebRTC gets introduced as it isn’t going into a green field where anything you pick immediately fits your needs.

Cloud migration and transformation

WebRTC was born in the cloud era. Many of its deployments are cloud based.

Most of its uses in non-cloud environments are actually enabling guest access from the public cloud towards the internal communications infrastructure. In other cases, it just needs to integrate with on premise data centers for things like users database and policies.

This places an additional strain on enterprises who are just starting out their migration towards the cloud.

Not your regular web application

WebRTC is different than other web technologies. It has a lot more moving parts to get to a minimal viable product, and then there’s that media quality issue to contend with. Its deployment needs to start as a global one for many of the use cases.

What are the server side components needed for WebRTC? Learn that in my free online mini video course.

Register now

#2 – Who should I have on my team?

Putting a team of developers on a WebRTC initiative is a daunting task. There are multiple disciplines they need to come from and the myth of a full stack developer that can do it all gets stretched even further here, as that superhero needs to also know about media processing, WebRTC APIs, browser changes and standardization processes.

Here’s what i wrote a while back about WebRTC developers after discussing the topic with a few people who manage/hire them.

Some other aspects you’ll need to decide on:

Internal vs External

Will you be relying on your existing engineering team or will you be outsourcing some/most of the project to an external vendor? Assuming you decide to go for an external vendor, who will maintain the service on an ongoing basis?

Multidisciplinary

The team in question needs to be multidisciplinary, capable of handling anything from media processing, to mobile app development, to backend integration work and ongoing DevOps and maintenance.

There needs to be a skilled product manager and a system architect who understand WebRTC enough to know what is possible and what’s… less possible. What incurs risk and where quick wins can be found.

Which new skills are needed?

Your teams. Do they have the necessary skills?

Here it goes to a lot more than just developers. There are product managers, testers, DevOps people, support staff.

Do I need to enhance some in-house capabilities?

What skills are you missing? If you operate everything on premise and WebRTC is forcing you to start using cloud services, then this is an in-house capability you will need to start contending with.

The same goes for mobile application development, going global in how you deploy servers, etc.

Looking to beef up the WebRTC experience and skills of your team? Check out my WebRTC training (the first module is free).

Enroll to my course

#3 – What technology stack do I use?

Different companies have different DNA to them. That often dictates what their technology stack will look like and how they’d prefer to partner/hire.

There are three main aspects that need to be taken into account when picking a WebRTC technology stack:

Open source / commercial

You might favor open source components and frameworks for your WebRTC service or you might be someone who prefers a commercial offering with a company focused on that product development.

Both alternatives can come with support contracts but companies seem to prefer one or the other.

Which alternative will it be for you?

Hosted or on prem?

These two approaches means different technology stacks, levels of expertise and staffing on your end.

Are you planning on hosting this on your own, in your data centers, on bare metal or in the cloud? Or are you going to have someone else host the service for you? Which parts of it will be managed and which will be self managed?

Acquisitions

WebRTC is still relatively new, with the vendors ecosystem dynamically shifting. There have been quite a few acquisitions in this space. These acquisitions sometimes removed solutions from the market, made them weaker or made them stronger.

When selecting a technology stack, the potential acquisition scenario of the vendors in question needs to be taken into consideration as well.

Fit for the requirements

This one seems silly but it is highly relevant and important.

Are you sure the technology stack you’ve selected can do the things you want it to do?

I’ve seen too many cases where the framework used wasn’t up for the task. Things like taking signaling when media servers needs to be used, picking a CPaaS vendor when the scenario requires too much control of media processing, etc.

Just look at what WebRTC signaling alternatives people have these days.

#4 – How do I know it is working?

You built it. Tested it in the lab. Did a call or two with your colleagues. Went home and showed it to a friend.

Does it scale? Will it work properly?

I had a customer recently who is developing a group video calling feature. He wanted to test the service with around 20 people in a single room. It wasn’t easy to find 20 people to run that one scenario. And when he did – things broke and needed fixing. So he had to find 20 people to run it again once a fix was put in place.

Testing is often neglected when it comes to WebRTC applications and it shouldn’t be. Take this one seriously. You can cobble up a testing environment on your own (there are even a few open source projects that can help you out here) or you can just use testRTC (I am a co-founder there) and start running tests within a couple of hours.

#5 – What do I track?

Tracking websites is rather “easy” these days. Use Nagios, Cacti, Zabbix or any other open source tool that sounds like a disease. Or use something like New Relic or DataDog to do it managed in the cloud.

Problem is, these tools only cover the machines metrics and performance and they don’t really watch for the media and its quality (or even if a session got connected for that matter). There’s no end to end monitoring/tracking.

You will need to collect WebRTC related metrics from either the backend or the devices (or both). You’ll need to track it for quality.

You’ll need to monitor your service (we’re doing a webinar on WebRTC monitoring next more @ testRTC – register to join).

How can I get help?

There are various ways in which you can get some help for what you are doing.

The best approach is probably to get some external assistance in what you are doing as part of your research and planning – even before you go outsourcing the whole project (if that’s the path you are going to take).

You can contact me for that, or go to other consultants. Some of the outsourcing vendors offer such consultancy service as well. Whatever you do – don’t go it alone. At least not in the planning stages.

The post The five make-or-break WebRTC challenges you need to address appeared first on BlogGeek.me.

With slightly more than two months and a half before the start of Kamailio World 2019, we are glad to announce the first group of speakers. Their details are available at:

• https://www.kamailioworld.com/k07/speakers/

The selection procedure is ongoing, therefore expect the details for other speakers to be published in the near future.The two interactive sessions present at all the past editions return in 2019, respectively VUC Visions and Dangerous Demos. In addition, we will have at least two other similar sessions to allow better interaction between Kamailio developers and the participants. As usual, expect presentations that go beyond Kamailio, covering Asterisk, FreeSwitch, VoLTE/IMS, WebRTC or IoT and technologies such as blockchain, containerisation and artificial intelligence.To facilitate more networking between attendees, the 2019 edition is adding a new social event in the evening of the 6th of May, a boat trip on the channels of the city center.The registration is open, you can do it now to benefit of the early registration price:

• https://www.kamailioworld.com/k07/registration/

Looking forward to meeting many of you at Kamailio World Conference, May 6-8, 2019, in Berlin, Germany!Thanks for flying Kamailio!

Is QUIC in WebRTC a solution looking for a problem or a real requirement?

QUIC is the next evolution of browser transport protocols. I’ve written about it in 2015, when Google started experimenting with the idea of replacing SCTP with QUIC for data channels. Three and a half years later, and we still don’t really have QUIC in WebRTC – at least not until last month. Google decided to come out with a new RTCQUICTransport for WebRTC in Chrome and written a post about it on their Chrome Developers site.

UDP, TCP, SCTP & QUIC. How do these transport protocols compare?

Download my free Transport Comparison Table

What is QUIC again?

I am not going to go into the technical details – I’ve done that in the past already, and there are other places for that. I want to focus here on the bigger picture.

If you look at the timeline of web transport protocols, it looks something like this:

We had TCP and UDP for some 40 years now. HTTP 1.1 is defunct, but runs most of the internet at the moment. HTTP/2 is growing nicely in adoption. According to W3Techs, we’re standing on ~33% adoption for HTTP/2 (Feb 2019):

HTTP/2 came to be after Google came out with SPDY, a “fix” for HTTP and got parts (most?) of it wrapped into HTTP/2 to get it standardized.

HTTP 1.0, 1.1 and HTTP/2 are all built on top of TCP. Signaling, which requires reliability and causality won’t work on top of UDP without adding these characteristics. After around 40 years, it is time for a refresh. Enter QUIC. It uses UDP and works in ways that are better than TCP for signaling purposes.

QUIC follows a similar path – Google created it to “fix” the ailments of HTTP over TCP. the end goal here is to turn it into HTTP/3.

Since QUIC is built on top of UDP, it can handle a lot more than just HTTP signaling. Which is why it is becoming an interesting topic for WebRTC –

Where QUIC in WebRTC fits exactly?

This is the real question. My answer to it in 2015 was this:

There are two places where QUIC fits in WebRTC:

1. In the signaling, which is out of scope of WebRTC, but interesting, as it enables faster connection of the initial call (theoretically at least)

2. In the data channel, by replacing SCTP with QUIC wholesale

Google’s answer in their post on Chrome Developers blog?

Why?

A powerful low level data transport API can enable applications (like real time communications) to do new things on the web. You can build on top of the API, creating your own solutions, pushing the limits of what can be done with peer to peer connections, […] WebRTC’s NV effort is to move towards lower level APIs, and experimenting early with this is valuable.

Why QUIC?

The QUIC protocol is desirable for real time communications. It is built on top of UDP, has built in encryption, congestion control and is multiplexed without head of line blocking.

Hmm… somehow they lost me in that explanation somewhere. This is about real time communications. It is about doing stuff on top of UDP. And it is about low level APIs. Great. Why do I need it again? For voice and video I already have SRTP in WebRTC. The SCTP data channel works quite well. So where exactly do I need this great thing called QUIC in WebRTC?

I think there’s merit, but it is in totally different places.

QUIC is about having a single, modern, common transport protocol for the web.

Here’s what we do today with WebRTC in terms of transport protocols:

• HTTPS, HTTP/2 or WebSocket for our signaling, which runs over TCP/TLS
• SRTP for media, which runs over UDP
• SCTP for data channels

There’s this popular drawing from the High Performance Browser Networking book that shows this amalgamation of protocols:

So many transport protocols in a single standard. This makes implementations of the backend more complex, as they need to be able to understand all these transport protocols as well. One can say that this is already common enough and widely used already that it is a solution looking for a problem, but the developer in me can appreciate unifying all these functionality over a single transport protocol.

Here’s how life will look like with QUIC in WebRTC:

• QUIC is being planned for HTTP/3, so it can be used for WebRTC signaling moving forward (replacing both WebSocket and HTTP/2)
• QUIC is looked as an SRTP replacement, which means sending real time audio and video can take place on top of it
• QUIC can replace SCTP for the data channels (that was the obvious use of QUIC in WebRTC to begin with)

Putting it into an architecture diagram of my own, we get this:

Much simpler.

What do we gain?

Theoretically, we can multiplex signaling, voice, video and low latency data in a single QUIC connection. That’s powerful:

• We can now tunnel or proxy all that WebRTC traffic with a lot less logic, boxes and code in our servers
• For smaller deployments, we might not even need multiple servers – just the one that handles it all
• It makes developing web servers that handle media and data channels simpler, as they need to support only one transport – QUIC, instead of having to implement multiple transports

What do we lose?

This isn’t going to happen in a day. Getting there is going to be a journey of multiple years and people will complain and whine about it along the way. Similar to what is happening today with WebRTC – whenever something is modified or something new is added – things tend to break (either because APIs get deprecated, behavior changes or just pure bugs).

Moving to a QUIC based stack is a huge undertaking – for the WebRTC stack, browser vendors and all the related internet infrastructure vendors.

Connecting to other realms such as SIP? That’s going to get even harder, as we move away from the domain of SRTP towards QUIC, more translations and protocol interworking will be required.

The question then becomes – is it worth all the fuss? Are we gaining enough to make this effort worthwhile?

Can you use QUIC in WebRTC now?

To some extent you can. Check out the recent post on QUIC @ webrtcHacks for that.

I will be adding a new dedicated lesson to my online WebRTC course about QUIC – my goal is to have the most up to date and relevant WebRTC training curriculum in the market, so keeping up with these changes comes with the territory.

Interested in WebRTC? Check out my WebRTC course.

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Continue reading First steps with QUIC DataChannels at webrtcHacks.