How fast will WebRTC go mainstream? And will it be "beyond the browser"?

I've come across two interesting things this morning:

1) Snapchat apparently now has 100m monthly users and is valued at $10bn
2) I heard an ad for a free conference calling service on the radio

Oh, and thirdly, I saw a TV ad for Amazon Kindle the other day, featuring its Mayday live-help service.

Common theme? WebRTC, but not in generic "video calls in your browser" style, nor for greenfield "standalone" communications, but to add a feature to an existing product.

Mobile-messaging "OTT" player SnapChat acquired platform provider AddLive earlier this year, which it now uses as the basis for its integral video-chat service. While Snapchat's main service is "ephemeral messages" which disappear after viewing, it also now allows existing contacts to chat in realtime, while the camera button is held down. It's not used by everyone, but is interesting in that it's "WebRTC as a feature" and also in that it's not a traditional "person A calls person B for X minutes" model. And of course, SnapChat runs as a native app on smartphones, NOT as a site accessed via the browser.

Amazon Mayday has long been discussed as a clever and expertly-integrated use of WebRTC video/screen-sharing for customer service and support. It is overlaid on an existing SIP-based voice contact centre platform. It does one-way video only, so again not a "call". And it's launched with a dedicated button, not as a browser/website action on the Kindle Fire.

And then Freeconference.co.uk (owned by Iotum), which has an established audioconferencing bridge service using ordinary circuit dial-in. It's offering WebRTC (via the browser) but in audio-only mode at present. Again, it's putting WebRTC into an existing service platform and business model.

Now it's true to say that all of these services are leading in their respective fields. Not all of their competitors or peers have gone down the same path yet. But nevertheless, they demonstrate that WebRTC:

1) Is indeed commercially-viable, and in the "real world"
2) Is not just browser-based, but also in mobile apps
3) Is not just about "calls"
4) Is not just about video
5) Works on iOS irrespective of Apple's support in Safari
6) Has a device-support level well above the 1bn level and an active user-base that will likely be >10m people by the end of the year
7) Spans both consumer and enterprise domains (and telecoms if you include appear.in, Tuenti & Skyway)

If I compare this to the situation a year ago, the change is staggering. It's very easy to miss the overall change in tone and relevance, when you're close to the coalface. Yet these examples - including run-of-the-mill radio and TV ads, and articles in mainstream business publications - are an indicator of what is to come.

Those of you that have read this blog for a while will know that it's quite rare for me to be more enthusiastic than "the market" about a technology. Normally I'm the one criticising hype and deluded expectation. Yet I'd still say that WebRTC is an unusual example of something that is underhyped. It feels quite strange for me to be an advocate rather than a cynic.

NEW 2014 REPORT NOW PUBLISHED - DETAILS HERE

Have I found the first WebRTC scam? Choose your platform provider with care...

WebRTC moves fast. As part of writing my 2014 Edition research report, I'm trying to keep on top of all the various new market entrants, especially the proliferating range of platform and API providers. So I was unsurprised when a search threw up a new (and UK-based) WebRTC company called Streamserver. I clicked the link, thought "Oh, another one" and fired off an email to the CEO asking for a briefing, and inquiring how he was positioning and differentiating his company in an increasingly crowded space.

Then I noticed something familiar - a reference to Double, the company making the cute telepresence robots that are familiar sights at WebRTC conferences (and which feature in most of my slide-decks). I know that Double has worked with Tokbox, so I was a bit surprised - maybe they had a better platform, and had ousted their rival? Maybe they provided a bit of software that was incorporated into Tokbox's platform?

Then I had another look at the "About Us" page. The CTO's picture looked very familiar to me. But his name didn't ring any bells. One of his colleagues looked like somebody I'd met at a conference as well. Then I realised - the CTO, allegedly "John Bair" looked like the identical twin of Tokbox CEO Scott Lomond, who's almost as prominent a figure as the robots his WebRTC software powers.

[I've got screen-caps if/when the site is taken down]

In fact, the whole website looked remarkably similar to Tokbox's - the people, the proposition, the customer references. The prices were much lower though. Initially I thought that maybe this was Tokbox trying a clever approach to price discrimination, or testing elasticity curves, with a cut-price sub-brand. Then I realised that giving pseudonyms to your executives is probably not best-practice for that type of exercise. Also, having no contact address, news, blog and - most-tellingly - no Twitter icon seemed dubious.

So I asked Tokbox directly, and judging from their response on Twitter, something dodgy is indeed afoot. I'd probably best avoid too many defamatory comments, but it seems like I've uncovered a rather "clumsy" (*cough*) attempt to gather names or payment details illicitly. Now it could be that the company is legitimate, but it hired a dodgy website designer who's copied some content into a template, or who put the website up live, while it should have still been locked-down. Or maybe there's another wholesale explanation - but I'll leave that one up to Tokbox's lawyers.

The other question is whether this is a one-off, or might get repeated elsewhere. I have no idea whether there are questionable cloud-services offers elsewhere in the web universe, although a search for cloud+fraud throws up various types of exploits. Presumably there are both financial and content/security-related risks in working with an untrusted WebRTC platform, although actual P2P media traffic should be secure unless it goes via a TURN or media-processing server. So I'd add "caveat emptor" to the already lengthening set of decision criteria about choosing a WebRTC platform. And I'd suggest that other platform players' web designers do an image search to see if their execs' mugshots are lurking elsewhere on the net.

I guess this means I can now describe myself as a WebRTC Analyst, WebRTC Pioneer and now the first WebRTC Private Investigator. And I can categorically confirm that clicking the "buy" link for my research report will take you to a genuine payment service, and only deduct the right amount of money from your credit card. And if you're a shady character thinking about setting up a dodgy platform company, forget it, read my report & exploit one of the genuine WebRTC opportunities instead....

EDIT - I've also noticed that the copied Terms of Service page, here, clumsily leaves in TokBox's street address and even Lomond's name as DMCA contact. Oops.

NEW! 2014 WebRTC Report Preview: 900m Business/Enterprise Users of WebRTC by 2019

Disruptive Analysis was the first analyst house to publish a detailed study and forecasts on WebRTC, way back in February 2013. The continually-updated forecasts of device support (c4bn by end-2016) are used across the industry, with the exponential-type chart a standard feature of conference presentations.

Now, Disruptive Analysis is preparing to launch a full refresh of the reference document on the industry's progress & forecast adoption rates. As before, it will cover all use-cases for WebRTC - enterprise B2C & B2B, consumer web, and telecom operators - adding in new analysis of areas like cloud platforms, real-time data, M2M/IoT and mobile WebRTC.

The report will be published in the next few weeks and will be 100+ pages in length, including more than 30 charts, tables and forecasts. Data will include updated estimates of device support of WebRTC (including PCs, tablets and smartphones) with geographic breakdowns. Uniquely, there will also be quantified forecasts per major use-case.

The report examines the shifting support of browser vendors and mobile platforms, including the role of ORTC, and 3rd-party cloud APIs used for creating WebRTC apps on mobile devices.

As a preview of one of the new data-sets, Disruptive Analysis is releasing an important new forecast. By the end of 2019, the total number of business-related users of WebRTC will exceed 900m, worldwide. This will split fairly evenly between regular users and occasional users. The full report will have more detail, methodology and analysis of this dataset.

The scale and scope of WebRTC adoption in enterprise and small-businesses is particularly stark, when one considers that there are only 300-400m conventional business "phone system" extensions or seats today using PBXs, IP-PBXs and UC. In other words, many or most business users of WebRTC will not get that capability from their normal business voice infrastructure.

Instead B2B WebRTC functions will be offered from sources such as:

• 3rd-party videoconferencing platforms and services
• Application-embedded communications (eg in horizontal systems like ERP, or dedicated vertical-industry software)
• Public cloud/app-based services, including free or "consumer-grade" products, business social-networking and other sources
• Carrier-based VoIP/VoLTE services extended over WebRTC
• Mobile-only services delivered via device browsers and native apps
• Guest access from customers/suppliers' systems or web portals 

As well as today's main business communications platforms of UC, conferencing and contact-centres, Disruptive Analysis also expects a range of new middleware platforms to emerge, embedding WebRTC directly into other applications. Several vendors and cloud platforms are already enabing that type of capability - some will be integrated with existing systems, while others will focus on new standalone "islands".

There is a parallel here with the telco world - a new class of customised business applications will embed "B2B-OTT communications", bypassing the classical central control of voice/UC vendor platforms, and with separate identity and security models.

This is just one of the angles that the new 2014-edition Disruptive Analysis WebRTC report will cover. There will also be detailed examination of service-provider use-cases for WebRTC, as well as adoption by the general "consumer web" and mobile apps.

All new online orders & payment for the existing WebRTC report (last updated in March 2014) will automatically receive the new report on publication. Click HERE to order the previous study.

For other inquiries about the report or to pre-order, please contact:
information AT disruptive-analysis DOT com

Voice-only applications: The Cinderella of WebRTC

I'm currently working on a major 2014 update of my WebRTC report & forecasts. As part of this, I'm reviewing all the major use-cases for the technology that have emerged so far, and those that are predicted in coming years. This spans enterprise, telecom, consumer web, mobile and assorted domains. (Pre-register interest in the report by email, or via the info request form on the right)

One thing I've noticed is that there's a surprising lack of voice-only use-cases for WebRTC. Video accounts for a far higher proportion of focus than could reasonably be expected. Indeed, when everyone lazily refers to WebRTC as "Skype in the browser", they almost always invoke an image of video chat or conferencing. You almost never hear terms like "VoIP in the browser" or "Vonage/Viber/etc in the browser".

Now certainly, there are various WebRTC audioconferencing products out there (eg Uberconference, Drum, Iotum), while Vonage itself had one of the first mobile WebRTC apps deployed last year. And a number of internal contact-centre solutions use a browser dashboard and a headset instead of a traditional telephony platform. Twilio CX is a good example of this. Plivo and Tropo also have voice-centric cloud platforms. Telefonica's Tuenti WebRTC app is currently VoIP-only too, as is Movirtu's Cloudphone extension for 2G/3G voice.

But these are exceptions. Most vendors, most apps and most WebRTC cloud API platforms are video-centric. It could be that video is just a harder problem for most developers, so WebRTC is a much bigger step forward. And of course, video is "shiny" and demo-friendly in a way that audio often isn't. It often needs bigger and better network boxes too, as well as smarts in mixing or transcoding that aren't (yet) as easy to commoditise or open-source at scale. And it needs lots of bandwidth, so understandably many people are keen to encourage its growth.

All these are fair enough, and I agree with them. WebRTC will indeed catalyse huge growth in video uses and usage. But it doesn't get around the fact that the vast bulk of today's realtime communications is voice-centric. Apart from the history, there's a practical reason - a lot of people cannot or will not use video in many cases - either because it's dangerous (eg driving/walking), invasive, distracting or uncomfortable. And if a given person is willing and able to use video, say, 30% of the time, that implies that any two people can use it just .3*.3 = 9% of the time. And any three, four or more people even more rarely, unless it's a pre-arranged conference. 

"Spontaneous video chat" is therefore very rare, unless preceded by a voice/IM session that escalates. (A video call to a ready-and-waiting customer service agent like Amazon Mayday is a special case).

So it seems strange that so few WebRTC applications and services are targeted at the audio-only, or even audio-primary marketplace.

I have another theory about this. I'm starting to wonder if people just don't quite feel comfortable "talking into a browser", unless it involves video as well. The browser is such an image-centric application, that audio-only communications websites often feel a bit weird. 

This is true for one-way audio too - we still see most audio/music use in dedicated applications - Spotify and Pandora and iTunes are still use desktop applications, even if they have some browser capability too. Web-based conferencing/collaboration software often pops open a separate "phone" window, if it doesn't just avoid VoIP altogether. Such tools also often assume use of a headset.

Some of this is a legacy of browsers needing plug-ins for audio communications - Flash, Silverlight and so on. (For music, it's also about DRM). There certainly have been a number of Flash-based PC VoIP websites in the past, but none has really emerged as a major winner.

Playing amateur psychologist here, I wonder if this is because audio-only applications (VoIP or WebRTC) have three modes of operation:

• Using an external microphone, typically a headset
• Using the integral microphone of a PC
• Using a phone (smartphone or deskphone)

Talking into a headset or handset somehow feels quite "natural" to us. In particular, the speaker and microphone are in the right places, relative to our ears and mouth, so we don't feel like we're shouting - and can indeed modulate our speech down to a whisper if we want. We've also been habituated to it by 100 years of telephony.

It's the middle category that's the problem here - talking into a PC or large tablet's integral mic, and listening to the other person via the device's speakers. Without video cues as well, it feels like you're either talking to an inanimate object, or hearing a "disembodied voice". If you can see the other person, you are able to suspend disbelief that you're conversing with a lump of glass and metal. You're not sure how loud you sound to the other person, and there's also the risk of feedback. You're also aware of the fact that you're broadcasting your conversation to your surroundings - especially if you're speaking unnaturally loudly to make sure the mic picks up your words. 

(To take this to the extreme, imagine having a voice-only conversation through your TV. Weird idea, isn't it?)

Now it could be argued that this will just drive video adoption further and faster, with WebRTC as another catalyst. And in some instances, it will indeed do that. But as already mentioned, video isn't always an option. In business, video can compromise confidentiality (eg the whiteboard behind you), or massively increase costs in a contact-centre scenario. For telcos, it brings a whole host of QoS and application issues, and increases transmission volumes multiple times, for an (at best) much more modest uplift in revenue. 

WebRTC-powered video will absolutely have many uses cases, but it equally certainly will never be ubiquitous or the default mode for all human communications. Therefore, there seems to be a significant gap for companies (or open-source) solutions to enable more pure-audio WebRTC than is currently seen.

To my mind, the opportunities will emerge in three areas:

• Use-cases where it can be assumed that headsets will already be being used, such as contact centres. Otherwise we face the irony and clunkiness of a plug-in free WebRTC service requiring the user to find and plug-in a physical device.
• Mobile use-cases, where WebRTC audio is baked-into an app. This is most obviously suited to telephony-style applications where the phone is held to an ear, but for some reason we don't seem to mind speaking into a smartphone or tablet from a distance quite as much as a PC. (Perhaps because it's held closer, typically).
• "Integral microphone & speaker" use-cases with much more well-designed UIs, that help overcome the cognitive dissonance of shouting at a machine. This might also mean WebRTC in standalone native applications, as an alternative to the browser.

I'm not a designer or ergonomicist, but observation of other PC-based VoIP services might yield some clues. For example, it helps a bit if the service or website displays a static photo or avatar of the other person - your brain starts perceiving "he/she" as the target of your speech, rather than "it". There's also mileage in displaying other visual cues - perhaps a dial-pad, or a graphic of a microphone, or even audio level meter so you don't feel the need to shout.

For audio-WebRTC to succeed, there will also be other considerations. For example, Skype maintains a little control-pad hovering in the foreground on a PC screen, even if the main app is behind something else (eg a presentation, or a notepad).

Some of the proposed use-cases for WebRTC are going to need some more thought here - for example "click to speak" to a call-centre, or perhaps communications integrated directly into emails or adverts.

Overall, I think that pure WebRTC-VoIP applications are something of a forgotten domain at the moment. Let's see if good design can provide a glass slipper for this Cinderella.

Details of Disruptive Analysis' WebRTC research & update service are available here. Please also get in touch via the request form, or information AT disruptive-analysis DOT com about the forthcoming update release.

Telecom vendors should not couple WebRTC too closely to their IMS strategy

A regular theme at WebRTC conferences, especially in the telco/service provider tracks, is "To IMS or not to IMS". There's usually a quick discussion of 3GPP standards progress, a presentation from a vendor or two, and an operator core-networks specialist talking about a trial they've run in a lab. There might also be an API management company, trying to pitch their tools as a way to expose IMS-anchored capabilities to developers.

All of which is fair enough. I expect that some of the telco use-cases for WebRTC will (eventually) involve IMS in some regards. An obvious one is extending VoLTE to non-LTE devices, as a form of "web-phone" rather than the dedicated softphone applications of the past. We might also see some variants on hosted PBXs, the long-mythical telco video-calling services, or some pointless RCS APIs that none of the roughly 17 active Joyn subscribers will ever use.

But my normal advice to operators - whether on conference panels, during private workshops or in my published research - is to diversify WebRTC across multiple units and teams. While the core networks/telephony team battles to add it to IMS, the enterprise unit should be looking at it in a completely separate way, as should the digital/OTT team, the IPTV arm, the developer-platforms initiative, the M2M unit, the internal CRM project, vertical-specific partnerships, wholesale, arms-length MVNOs and all the various local OpCos.

In other words, IMS-related work should only make up maybe 20-30% of a typical operator's overall WebRTC investment, focus and resources. It's a part of the story, but a slow-moving and mostly unsexy part. It might be generating a few extra features, but nothing to move the needle. The usual mantra among the IMS/WebRTC contingent is "it's just another access", which pretty much defines the limits of their vision and ambition straight away.

But there's another dimension here, on the supplier side. Certain vendors only ever reference WebRTC in the context of their IMS solutions and products. Again, it's "just another access", with a fairly unsubtle corollary message of "it's just another function of our IMS, so please buy it".

I'll call out Huawei in particular here. I don't think I've seen anything about WebRTC from the big Chinese vendor that didn't have a IMS slant - even its otherwise cool M2M Telemedicine demo, which inexplicably tries to kludge in an RCS angle. This may be reflective of the Chinese market as a whole - despite heavy presence of companies in the standards bodies, I'm not aware of many actual consumer-web or enterprise-centric WebRTC deployments and apps coming from China.

Alcatel-Lucent is almost as polarised, although sometimes with a veneer of API glue between the two. It even has a white paper distinguishing IMS-based options from "islands", which is set up on a straw-man premise asking whether WebRTC could ever replace the PSTN and demanding that "action must be taken to incorporate IMS with WebRTC immediately". The paper has all sorts of extremely-questionable assertions, including "People must be universally reachable though voice, video [!] & messaging". Written by George Orwell's great nephew, I assume, and possibly worthy of a full dissection in another post. (Full unintentional-irony marks to ALU for the download web-form asking for Twitter handle rather than phone number, though). 

Mavenir seems to be solidly planted at the IMS-only end of the WebRTC spectrum too, although that is unsurprising given its focus as a company. NSN is pretty much "missing in action" with regard to WebRTC, but the only recent mention on its website is in a reference to an IMS session controller.


(Semantic sidenote: at the moment, IMS is merely an archipelago of small islands connected by wooden canoes, compared to the Australias & Greenlands of Internet apps)

Conversely, while Ericsson is obviously an IMS believer, it seems willing to go off-message on WebRTC - here's a prototype it's been playing with on Google Glass, complete with Node.JS for signalling. Cisco has a big enterprise presence, so it's no surprise to see it being at least as enthusiastic about WebRTC in an UC and conferencing context as it is in the telco domain. 

GenBand, Oracle, Sonus and Dialogic are also fairly agnostic, looking at both IMS and non-IMS use cases (and varying their messages depending on the audience and event concerned). Metaswitch targets both IMS and non-IMS service providers with its WebRTC gateway capability, as well as integrating into its open-source NFV-IMS Clearwater platform. Acision seems to be looking at both telco and enterprise domains with WebRTC, and while some of the messaging angles derive from its SMS heritage with a faint whiff of RCS, it's all quite well-buried under a cloak of "interoperability where wanted".

I'll do a deeper analysis of this (plus various other vendors) in an upcoming update of my WebRTC report, but it's really jumped out at me in the last few weeks.


The key point here is that vendors - even if they are IMS "true believers" need to follow in the footsteps of the telcos. WebRTC activity and product development MUST NOT be "just another bit of the IMS product", but must be democratised across the entire organisation and its affiliates. All the vendors have big integration, support and professional services teams - these should be using WebRTC as part of their internal and client communications. The OSS/BSS functions should pragmatically employ it. 

The R&D teams should be using video and screen-sharing. Vendors' new product teams should be looking at opportunities around cloud platforms & API management tools for telcos that wish to emulate Telefonica Tokbox. They should be thinking about re-entering the enterprise market, even if they sold off their old PBX businesses. Interactive TV systems, set-top boxes, M2M infrastructure and vertical/government solutions should embrace WebRTC where relevant. None of these should be beholden to IMS integration as a core strategy, even if it intersects at relevant points.

Maybe a higher fraction of WebRTC efforts - say 30-40% of total investment & resources - should be based around IMS integration for some vendors. But it is exceptionally risky to put all WebRTC eggs in a fragile, slow and unambitious WebRTC basket.

Ultimately, IMS needs WebRTC more than WebRTC needs IMS, both for service providers and the web at large. If vendors like ALU & Huawei continue to deliberately ignore (or worse, denigrate) non-IMS use cases for WebRTC, they are disenfranchising themselves from a huge chunk of the future communications industry.

So-called "Platform Neutrality": nothing to do with Net Neutrality, and a minefield of unintended consequences

One of the things I've noticed cropping up over the last year has been the concept of "platform neutrality". It's a line of argument used by telecom lobbyists and executives to shed light on perceived unfairness stemming from Apple and Google's control of their respective ecosystems (and, to a degree, Microsoft and Amazon and others).

It seems innocuous at first - I've seen it defined as "consumers should be free to procure and use legal apps and contents on any platform from any source".

In other words, the telecoms industry doesn't like the control that Apple has over its AppStore and iTunes and similar platforms, nor Google over the Play Store and other properties. Some of this is fairly reasonable - Apple has some rather arcane, non-transparent and inconsistent policies about apps it allows in its store, while Google could be accused of manipulating its search results in ways to maximise revenues. There are also persistent rumours that only favoured developers get access to "private APIs" as well.

It's not obvious to me, however, that such practices warrant either huge regulatory intervention, nor conflation with the more prominent concerns about Net Neutrality. There might be some unfairness - perhaps even questions over competition - but they are both entirely separate from, and of a different magnitude to, various network practices that telcos have been lobbying for. Apart from anything else, all iOS and Android devices have open access to the web, which many market participants keep claiming to be the equal (or at least equivalent) of native apps.

I would certainly concur that extra transparency from Apple and Google about their app policies would be beneficial, as well as some guarantee of consistency and right-of-redress. Lack of portability of apps, music and other material could also be an angle where competition authorities might probe. 

Yet I find it deeply hypocritical that telcos are trying to position themselves as champions here, as they don't really have a particular axe to grind and many practice egregious examples of application lock-in themselves. I'm also not aware of any operator apps that have been blocked from appstores, although some may still be smarting from their own failed attempts at launching stores and application platforms like the ill-fated WAC.

But there are deeper problems here, if you start thinking about the possible legislation of "platform neutrality". Given that increasingly "everything is software", any such rules would have very widespread ramifications - as well as all manner of ironic unintended consequences which could harm telcos even more than the device/Internet giants.

So while the intention might just be to allow customers to buy digital music from any online store to install on an iPhone, rather than just iTunes, extending that to a general rule would also imply:

• Forcing telcos to ensure that other telcos (or Internet companies') telephony and messaging systems were available as alternatives to their in-house "primary voice" offers. In other words, users should be able to select Orange or AT&T or Skype as primary telephony providers on a Vodafone or Telefonica-provided handset.
• Force telcos to allow users to replace connection-management software with any similar apps of choice. This would wipe out any future attempt to force devices to specific WiFi networks, for example.
• If consumers are able to procure any content or app, they should also be able to remove or delete any app. This would work out badly for operators selling customised handsets, pre-loaded with their own apps or extra features. It could also mean that re-flashing an operator handset with legal (but vanilla) OS variants would also be expressly permitted in law, without sanction from the operator.
• Forcing network vendors to allow 3rd party software to run on routers or switches - or their future SDN/NFV platforms. So Cisco might be forced to release APIs for Huawei & Ericsson Oracle to use, and vice-versa
• Forcing providers of set-top boxes for cable/IPTV to allow Netflix, Hulu, Amazon and Apple software to be installed onto their platforms
• Forcing cloud SaaS providers to accept rivals' applications on their platforms - maybe hosted Office 365 on Google, or Microsoft CRM on Oracle's cloud, or Twilio on Verizon's cloud.
• Forcing games console providers to deny exclusive deals, or special versions that cannot play on rival systems
• Forcing car manufacturers to accept each others apps on in-vehicle systems - say, a Ford-branded navigation app in a BMW, or Mercedes engine-management software in a Jaguar.
• Forcing TV manufacturers to allow users to install ad-blocking software.

I'm sure there are many other awkward cases where "allowing any legal software to be procured" could back-fire with fairly catastrophic effects on the operator.

And all this is before you get to issues around exactly how all this gets enforced, especially with platforms that are part-cloud, part-OS, part-Web and part-silicon/firmware. There's also all sorts of bear-traps about how all this actually manifests in APIs, what happens when "porting" stuff to new platforms incurs extra IPR costs (eg because on platform has licenced a patented technology, but another hasn't) and innumerable others.

In short, a lot of this is just usual telco whining about Apple and Google being smarter and faster than 3GPP and GSMA. And, as usual, the lack of understanding of the nature of software risks huge unintended consequences - especially around the forced "neutrality" of telcos' own platforms.

There possibly is a case to be made for application or content portability between different devices and OS's, to reduce switching costs from one platform to another and reduce lock-in risks to consumers. And I do agree that AppStore policies should be more transparent and enforced consistently.


But notably, none of this is something that consumer groups get especially riled about, especially to the same degree as Net Neutrality. Linking the two areas is mendacious and irrelevant. And above all, the "principles" of so-called Platform Neutrality exhibit seriously woolly thinking and a complete misunderstanding of the roles of software platforms. Some measure of lock-in or platform control is often desirable - including for the telecoms industry at itself. 

The main similarity between supporting Platform Neutrality and opposing Net Neutrality is that both have the potential to have huge and damaging unintended consequences for the telecoms industry. Be careful what you wish for.

WebRTC applications: are we expecting too much radical innovation, too soon?

One of the recurring themes at WebRTC conferences and demo sessions is a slight air of crestfallen anticipation, when those of us who are "old hands" are shown YAVA - "Yet Another Video-chat Application" or YACC - "Yet Another Contact Centre".

I've been watching WebRTC evolve for over 3 years now, and I'm really looking forward to the "new stuff" which is going to replace the old paradigms of the "phone call" or the "videoconference". I love seeing things that are genuinely new, such as some of the emerging ideas for data sharing between browsers - WebRTC CDNs, or privacy-protectinng web searches.

But those are the exceptions. Back in the real commercial world, I keep getting shown YAVAs & YACCs rather than all the cool new toys. I want to see facial-expression reading video analysis, which automatically draws a smiley face on my caller if they're sad. I want to see my own face used as an avatar in social media, with data-channel sharing of sensor information to show if I'm warm or just embarrassed. I want infra-red CCTV of cute squirrels in Regents Park & to be able to confuse them by feeding them 3D holographic peanuts*. I want a WebRTC drone, dammit, even if I can't use it legally & don't have any applications for it!

Yes, there are some cool things starting to emerge - but most of these are applications or twists on existing ideas. Video-chat in healthcare. Video-chat for online consultations & training sessions. Video-chat in contact centres, including one-way video for Amazon Mayday. Video-chat with co-browsing of a website. Video-chat with Instagram-style filters. Video-chat with web cookies and speech analytics.

So yes, they're all video-chat. But in useful forms, often where no use of video existed before, or which required separate Skype or Hangouts sessions with minimal integration. This is all a good set of developments, yet we're too easily bored by it.

Part of the issue here is that the broader mass of web/app/enterprise developers aren't really sure how to think about communications yet. In particular, they are unlikely to both think about a new feature (embedded video/voice) AND ALSO think about using it in new ways. Ask most people about forms of communication, and you'll just hear "phone calls" or "Skype" or "Whatsapp" or "email".

I have enough trouble educating the telecoms industry that there's more to communications than a "call". The idea that the broader developer universe (focused on solving other business problems) is going to leapfrog 120 years of learned behaviour and go straight to free-form, unproven ways of setting up realtime interactions is a tall order. Especially as they also have to think about getting the WebRTC machinery working. Very few are going to go straight from uncommunicative websites/apps, to entirely new concepts with push-to-talk video or media-processed & auto-initiated audio streams with inbuilt lie-detection & realtime translation.

I think we're in danger of setting unreasonable expectations for WebRTC. All of us jaded old communications veterans, who've "been there, done that" with assorted flavours of videoconferencing, might just overlook how much value there is in many more useful and cheap forms of videoconferencing that have been tuned specifically for doctors or TV broadcasters or insurance loss-assessors.

I guess that original inventors of, or commentators on, petrol and diesel internal combustion engines must have got a bit bored by the year 1890. "Oh. It's yet another car. Only with 4 wheels this time. Whoopee". 

But then eventually the Wright Brothers showed up (and the tank-builders of WW1) and things moved on. Yet mundane petrol-powered cars were what led to Henry Ford and the dynamics of the 20th Century.

Remember, there's only a handful of easily-conceived interaction models and variables here. Forward-facing or rear-facing camera. One way or two way. One person initiates, the other accepts, two people "meet" consensually, or something random. What-you-see-is-what-you-get, or media-processed in some way. Audio, video, a mix of both. A conversation with one or both people speaking, or images/sounds of other objects or hybrids. 

You get the picture - most folk will tend to revert to the most obvious models such as two talking heads, at least initially. And there's plenty of value to be found in extending that model.

It's up to all of us to try to catalyse truly "new stuff" - either by dreaming about it and making it happen, or by highlighting cool stuff when it does appear. But let's not denigrate the bread-and-butter, especially if someone has realised it's actually a bit better as a sandwich, or as toast with Marmite on it. So YACC away, YAVA's alright in my book. Just make it a bit different and better than whatever has existed before.


*no squirrels were harmed in the writing of this blog post

Mobile Net Neutrality - Exploiting the Grey Areas

There is no one definition of Net Neutrality. It is a concept rather than a technical or legal definition. It is not even clear in many eyes whether it applies to all networks (no) or just the Public Internet (yes) - and what happens where they both share infrastructure such as broadband access (err... good question). 

Certain things are definitely "not neutral" under any definition, such as deliberate degradation or outright blocking of legal Internet content or applications, on otherwise uncongested networks. Conversely, other aspects such as capped data plans, the use of CDNs or protections against denial-of-service attacks are viewed as completely acceptable, by all but the most hardcore "activists". 

Much of the current furore is around the prospect of paid-priority "fast lanes", otherwise known euphemistically as "specialised services", and whether they force other non-partnered traffic onto unusable "slow lanes". This also tends to draw distinctions between fixed and mobile data broadband, because the former already have dedicated QoS-managed pathways for carrier VoIP and IPTV, while mobile broadband generally does not, except for a few tough-to-implement VoLTE instances. 

Given this blog's focus, the main emphasis here is on mobile data models rather than fixed broadband.

The vagaries of mobile networks such as interference, mobility, devices & coverage, and the fact that most traffic to smartphones goes via 3rd-party WiFi anyway, tend to make discussion of general 4G paid-QoS mostly irrelevant. You can also add in the lack of any obvious willingness of market participants to pay for "unprovable but slightly better than average QoS, honest" and the ever-better capability of most software to deal with occasional network variability and glitches.

Some market participants try to steer discussion towards totally irrelevant topics, such as paid peering arrangements, or "discrimination" by Apple or Google in their app-stores or access to OS APIs - usually to try to create strawman arguments about their own preferred stance on real Net Neutrality. While both might be examples of "unfairness" in an abstract sense, they are completely decoupled from broadband access to the Internet or other services.

Such "red herrings" are simply used to deflect the Neutrality discussion. But a more interesting set of developments can be considered "grey areas". Many mobile operators are trying to nibble around the edges of Net Neutrality - partly to see how far they can push regulators' boundaries, but also in an effort to differentiate their broadband propositions. They are testing the waters with approaches such as:

• User-defined prioritisation, where the customer rather than telco defines their own Internet connection's "non-neutrality", or chooses ISP-managed offers like "gamer broadband", or various child-protection content-filtering options.
• Various "worse-efforts" concepts, where "unimportant" traffic can be delayed until, or sent pre-emptively during, network quiet periods.
• Zero-rating of certain content types, i.e. exempting specific data from users' quotas. (I posted a detailed post here a few weeks ago). In this scenario, nobody pays per-MB for the data, although there may be revenue-share or other partnership models involved.
• Sponsored-data / "sender-pays" models, such as that proposed by AT&T, where (in theory) 3rd-party application or content firms pay to offset users' traffic consumption. I wrote a fairly scathing post here
• Application-based charging, for example a flat-rate per day for using Facebook or Whatsapp.
• User-based prioritisation, where certain customers (eg business users) receive better speeds or QoS than other users. While this does not explicitly differentiate between applications or content, in most instances businesses don't watch Netflix, and consumers don't use SAP.
• Differential treatment or pricing of data that goes via proxy-based platforms (eg Opera Mini, BlackBerry) rather than direct to the Internet
• M2M services managed differently to their consumer-centric data plaforms
• Dedicated MVNO-type deals, such as those used by Amazon with its early Kindles, which look similar to "sponsored data" models. 

It can be seen that most of these "grey areas" involve differential pricing, rather than more "invasive" network-based QoS and prioritisation. Such approaches are easier both technically and in discussions with regulators. They also allow the operators' marketing teams to work (fairly) swiftly to construct plans and deals, without getting mired in the cumbersome technical and organisational realities of network operations.

Two of the most high-profile approaches to "Grey Neutrality" are the zero-rating and sponsored-data approaches. AT&T's January announcement of its Sponsored Data API programme has been a catalyst, and also in the US recently, T-Mobile has launched its "Music Freedom" plan as well as zero-rating speed-test data. 

Orange zero-rates traffic to its personal cloud service for consumers, Telia zero-rates Spotify and DT zero-rates its German mobile TV service. Of course, many other internal operator services such as MMS or closed-garden portals have long been available without incurring extra data usage costs, while BlackBerry plans have often been subscription-based rather than per-MB.  

Numerous emerging-markets operators have free offers to access Facebook/Twitter/Wikipedia/Whatsapp/Viber and numerous other services, including some giving free access to educational materials - although often this is in countries which don't have Neutrality legislation anyway.

To be fair, the original vision for mobile data services was that they would be "on net" and billed in various modes, rather than volume-based Internet access. To a large extent, "raw" Internet access was only offered on mobile after most of the other 3G service models failed to gain any traction.

It is therefore unsurprising to see operators look to go back to the model of bundled or separately-billed services - although the main question is how this fits with the app-download paradigm, which normally implies a need for "vanilla" Internet access rather than hooks into a telco-resident server.

While the lawyers and lobbyists continue to argue over "fast lanes" in a black-and-white fashion, Disruptive Analysis believes that these tend to miss the point anyway, at least in mobile. There are only a few realistic use-cases for such QoS-optimised propositions, and they are unlikely to ever contribute more than a couple of percentage points to total mobile broadband revenues.

The action is going to be in the "grey areas". Disruptive Analysis new report predicts over 1.5bn users of zero-rating by 2019, for example. In the sponsored data realm, the most promising category is in advertising, where it seems relatively non-controversial (and consumer-friendly) for unsolicited promotional content to be paid for by a third party, rather than consuming the user's quota. 

Sponsored data and zero rate charging - Non-neutral mobile broadband models from Dean Bubley

There may be a few other "grey areas" emerging as well - expect interesting variants to emerge as SDN/NFV takes hold over the next 5 years - perhaps with CDNs or caching to be pushed down to the radio network. This will enable many services to be delivered "not directly from the Internet", although whether the APIs are available to mainstream mobile app developers is questionable.  New forms of MVNO may emerge, as well as capabilities delivered via private cellular networks, WiFi or via telcos' API platforms.

Regulators and others will find these challenging to deal with, so need to ensure that rules are framed flexibly and clearly.

In any case - they key thing for Net Neutrality isn't the fireworks at the FCC or in Brussels. It's the smaller instances of edging closer to the rules' limits, especially around charging. Conversely, we should expect a lot more push-back and unintended consequences, where operators try to unilaterally block or degrade mainstream web services. We already see Netflix "outing" Verizon's perceived/alleged games - that type of naming & shaming (and perhaps lawsuits) will be much more common, as well encryption and obfuscation.

FOR MORE ON NON-NEUTRAL MOBILE BROADBAND MODELS, CLICK HERE

Quick thoughts from WebRTC Expo last week

I've already written about the telco aspects of the big WebRTC conference & exhibition last week.

This is just a quick summary of some of the other things that have stuck in my mind. It doesn't cover all the companies or trends I saw - a more holistic analysis will be included in forthcoming updates of my paid WebRTC research. Also, there were sections of the event (in multiple streams) that I couldn't attend personally - hopefully there will be other articles on healthcare apps, for example.

Top of mind themes emerging are:

• Customer service & call centre use-cases are everywhere, and definitely the most "commercial" part of WebRTC at present. The show featured a lot more integrated solutions, plugging WebRTC into existing platforms & industry structure - and adding in the power of the web in mashups for both agents & end-users. Various vendors had ways to analyse WebRTC speech, annote the agent's information via a browser etc. It all has an aura of "realness" around it, especially for finance and retail sectors.
• There's a whole range of other actually-deployed services, especially around distance-learning/training, video chat and conferencing. That said, a lot of UC and collaboration use-cases are more "now WebRTC-enabled!" rather than "designed from the ground-up for WebRTC".
• There's still a bit of a gap for innovative "pure WebRTC" use-cases that don't lean on traditional forms of communications, or just move beyond legacy telephony APIs. There's some fun music-jamming things, or a handful of games, but I haven't seen a (desktop) WebRTC-based equivalent of Chatroulette or anything clearly "viral". I'm also a bit perturbed that the adult industry seemingly hasn't bothered to turn up to the WebRTC party - usually it's first in line for any new web technology, and its absence is a bit of a puzzler.
• Where WebRTC innovation does turn up, it may well be in specific industry verticals. We know about finance and healthcare and real-estate demos and deployments - but I'm starting to wonder about government, media, utilities and so on. That said, an interesting chat at a separate event yesterday opened my eyes some possibilities around public safety.
• Many of the other use-cases are going to be heavily mobile-centric. This implies a need for 3rd party APIs/SDKs/platforms, as few consumer mobile apps use the browser, even on Android devices where WebRTC can be properly supported. On iOS, a 3rd-party approach is almost mandatory to embed voice/video into native apps. Purists complain that it "isn't proper WebRTC", but that's an irrelevant technical religious debate and doesn't detract from the opportunity. One company (Imagination) was even suggesting to rip out the Google/GIPS media engine from WebRTC and use theirs instead, as it's apparently mobile-optimised and can deal with the acoustic and silicon idiosyncrasies of smartphones better.
• Actually, the WebRTC purists (especially the "web" bit) were wincing a lot last week. Plug-ins are back with a vengeance, with at least 3 companies offering products. Temasys and Priologic had a bit of a barney about closed-but-free vs. open-source. I'm not a security specialist, but I can appreciate why tighter controls over what accesses the camera/mic are desirable. In my view, the purists have a lot more wincing ahead, as even if Apple & Microsoft adopt WebRTC (see below), both have millions of legacy version users who don't update.
• In a nutshell, RTCWeb (the IETF standard for nuts-and-bolts protocols) is looking ever-more important than WebRTC (the W3C API exposing all that stuff to web developers). Frankly, making the technology of nasty, complex bits of realtime communications infrastructure all work nicely, is rather more important than the precise way it's presented to developers. The "ends" of democratising voice, video & data into apps and websites and devices easily justify occasionally fudging the "means".
• For companies or developers that don't have longstanding communications expertise, the route to adoption of WebRTC is likely to be via one a platform / WebRTCaaS provider of some sort. There's a lot to choose from - some voice-centric, some video-oriented, some integrated with existing call centres or messaging, some more interested in QoS / scalability, some more around pre-built apps, some more mobile-oriented and so forth. Each developer will have to navigate a long list to see which are the best fits with their specific needs.
• Part of the problem is that some people read "MS & Apple don't support it" headlines and don't look beyond that. Most people I speak to don't realise what it is that all the WebRTCaaS API/SDK providers like Tokbox & Temasys & Requestec etc are actually doing. I think there needs to be a neater "category" and some serious evangelism - at the moment, I get the impression that the standards guys are a bit irked by their relevance and growing importance, just as they are with the SBC/gateway proliferation rather than P2P use-cases.
• The big discussion about silos vs. integration with legacy systems, via gateways, is largely confined to voice-primary uses, given that's what legacy telephony, UC and contact centres do almost exclusively. Video communications today is basically enterprise conferencing, plus Skype/FaceTime/Hangouts/consumer mobile apps. That's not to say that video-gatewaying won't be more important in future - and will likely need a lot of heavy-lifting infrastructure - but today, interop is about plain-old phone calls.
• Microsoft gave a presentation which (in a nutshell) said that (a) it's deeply engaged in this area, but (b) don't expect IE to support WebRTC 1.0 any time soon, except GetUserMedia APIs. There's a long list of other HTML5 bits & pieces waiting to be implemented by the IE team, so WebRTC has to battle for engineering resources against all of those, as well as undoubted pressure from Skype & Lync teams. However it appears ever-more enthusiastic about ORTC, which is showing so many signs of forming the basis of WebRTC 2.0, that various of the 1.0 advocates are getting a little irked at its jumping the gun.
• Various people were pessimistic/optimistic about Apple. "They won't bother", "But they joined the working group", "They'll wait for the standard" etc. In essence - nobody knows, everyone's got a theory. And we'll probably all be wrong. Happy to give you my own guesses if you want....
• Datachannel was around more as a "supporting actor" than as a headline act. Various use-cases had messaging or co-browsing or screen-sharing incorporated, but there seemed to be relatively few "pure" datachannel use-cases. I didn't see much M2M or IOT stuff around. A bit disappointing
• I think some people are getting impatient and expecting things overnight. It is only literally 3 years since WebRTC was even spoken about publicly - I remember it from the eComm in San Francisco in June 2011, the day before my & Martin Geddes' first Future of Voice workshop in Santa Clara. It's worth noting that with Snapchat/AddLive & the probable imminent arrival of WebRTC Hangouts, as well as various customer service functions, we're probably not far off 100m active users. Much as I hate  "Fastest growing web/comms thing EVER!!!!" articles, I could probably imagine writing one in a few months' time. Let's just put it this way - I expect there are already more active WebRTC users than RCS or VoLTE users, and it's certain to stay that way.

Overall, I'd say the Expo was more "grown up", with real use-cases, but perhaps a dearth of truly surprising "Web whiz-bangs". And I still haven't seen a WebRTC-enabled drone, despite the cavernous hangar-like venue used for the event being perfect for one.

The other side of the coin: a few telcos DO "get it"....

What a difference a week makes.

Last week I was in Munich at the NextGen Service Platforms event, listening to the last of the dinosaurs coming up with ever-more improbable reasons why the Internet asteroid was going to have to play nicely with terrestrial IMS networks. My rather bruising write-up is here.

This week I've been in Atlanta, at the WebRTC Expo. There's still a few dinosaurs prowling the conference hall, but they're mostly here on fact-finding missions about growing feathers or evolving into mammals.

In particular, I discovered a couple that have already made the leap from Mesozoic to Cenozoic eras. I was moderating a session featuring two of the telcos that have taken WebRTC (and also Telco-OTT models) to heart most closely: Telefonica and Telenor.

First off, a mea culpa. Last year, when Telefonica announced the end of its Digital unit as a separate unit, I assumed that this meant that the old-school telco "white blood cells" had rejected the Internet implants, pushing back against the innovative, risk-taking culture that spawned TuMe & TuGo. Turns out that I was wrong - it may well have been the other way around.

The new overall head of Communications Services for Telefonica is Ian Small, the former CEO of the acquired TokBox unit, the WebRTC platform provider based in SF, and which was inside the former Digital business. He's now in charge of delivering the future of voice, video and messaging for 300m-odd customers. And he recognises that traditional telephony and SMS is inevitably going to decline, so is out looking for interesting & plausible ways to replace the missing revenues. 

While he clearly has a lot of politics to deal with - not all parts of large businesses grasp change at  the same pace - I suspect that it's going to take an awful lot to convince him of the benefits of lower-than-common-denominator RCS/joyn or that IMS is an optimal platform for innovation. (My RCS Zombie slide from Munich got another good reception)

Telefonica is developing quite a few proof-points for disruption around voice and video:

• TokBox, which is increasingly looking like one of the real leaders in offering WebRTC as a service, especially around video-based customer service & mobile SDKs, as well as its deal with Mozilla (see below). Its customer references now include brands like esurance (for mobile-app claims adjustment) and Bridgestone (in-store golf kiosks)
• Tuenti, which I wrote about a few months ago, which combines internal-MVNO, Telco-OTT mobile apps, WebRTC and zero-rated data all in one. It subsequently blogged about its WebRTC work here - looks like it didn't use Tokbox, but did its own implementation. The fact that each business unit at Telefonica is free to create its own products quickly, ignoring the so-called "core" infrastructure, is class-leading in terms of organisational dynamics.
• The now-defunct TUMe standalone VoIP app, and the still-lively phone-extension TUGo which seems to have quite a lot of fans. I've seen some other interesting demos as well.
• A new deal with Mozilla/Firefox, which is intending to embed video-calling directly into the browser. Not web-pages, but as part of the furniture of the browser itself. Given that Firefox has 450m users, and auto-updates regularly, this essentially gets TF/TokBox to "half a Skype" almost overnight. Add in making new versions of low-cost Firefox OS smartphones WebRTC-friendly, too
• Assorted partnerships, including with Intel, Qualcomm (chips for the aforementioned low-end devices, I'm guessing with hardware VP8 acceleration) and Ericsson
• References to "intention", "purpose" and the value of voice/video beyond the transport of minutes of speech.

Overall, I still rate Telefonica as probably the large telco that most "gets" the future of communications, even though I'm sure there remain differences of opinion across the company. (The O2 Germany presentation in Munich about the harsh realities of IMS/VoLTE deployment being an obvious case-in-point, and I wouldn't be surprised to find a dipolodocus or two still wandering around Madrid).

Then there's Telenor. Unlike Telefonica, it still has its separate "Digital"-branded arm, which has done things such as its previous Telco-OTT content business Comoyo, and various other current projects. Like Telefonica, the difference here is organisational - Telenor Digital has the freedom to actually launch things, without getting explicit permission from the "mothership". This is very different to other service providers, where labs or "innovation centres" are often just graveyards of good ideas that have been sat-upon by vested interested elsewhere.

I'd previously spoken to Telenor about appear.in, its simple web-based video chat service. Although similar to a number of other WebRTC "video room" services, it seems to have gained more attention than some, especially as it's designed to have minimal "sign-up friction". It also now has one of the few massmarket-ready WebRTC mobile consumer apps, and is allowing users to claim specific rooms (I've got appear.in/disruptiveanalysis allocated to me, for example).

But what really grabbed the attention of the conference attendees was the history of how appear.in was created - one of the least telco-like stories I've come across. As a web-centric company, Telenor Digital came across WebRTC quite a while back and thought it was interesting. So, last summer, it assigned 3 interns a project to try and create something cool with it. (The word "cool" continually featured in the presentation and Q&A - itself pretty unique for a telco-run initiative). 6 weeks later, appear.in was born, and indeed, seemed cool to the people who'd asked the developers to work on it.

As for how it got from that early version to actually being deployed? A lengthy cycle of testing, integration, focus groups, regulatory inquiries, BSS/OSS development etc? 

No. Try this instead:

"Well, it was summer in Norway at that point. And all the grown-ups were on holiday. So we just launched it".

Apparently a senior Telenor exec was quizzed by a Norwegian newspaper about his cool new Skype competitor. He had to give a tactful "I'll get back to you" answer.

Since then, appear.in has continued to grow (although no hard numbers have been released yet). It's appeared on the BBC's Click technology show, and has launched a mobile app version. Oh, and the "infrastructure" needed to run it costs about $300/month.

A critical aspect of appear.in is that it's as much about design ("cool!") as it is about technology. In fact, the Atlanta speaker Dag-Inge Aas has written his own excellent blog post about it on appear.in's site, here. In his words "WebRTC allows developers to focus on creating good, innovative user experiences, instead of worrying about the technology". That is completely antithetical to the traditional telco mindset of worrying about standards, interoperability, interface specs  before eventually - if ever - actually talking about the end-user's needs and behaviour.

As yet, appear.in is not being monetised. It's quite possible that the other units of Telenor may take a more conservative approach to future voice and video service creation. But I'm willing to bet that it's units like Telenor Digital that will make a difference in the medium term, and the fact that it has the autonomy to create and launch disruptive new services is a good sign. Compare and constrast "the grown-ups were on holiday, so we launched it anyway" with "we asked the regulator about WebRTC before we built anything, and got 12 pages of questions in response". Which one sounds like the web? And which one sounds like the traditional way of doing things?

It's about time for telcos to start asking for forgiveness if they need to, instead of permission just-in-case. And it's about time regulators and governments encouraged them to do so, by ensuring that any sanctions (if needed) are rare and proportionate.

As I wrote last week, the key thing is not migrating legacy networks. It's migrating legacy thinking and philosophy. Design-led approach, freemium models, a nuanced attitude to QoS, a "let's just do it" philosophy, web-style timescales and costs (3 developers x 6 weeks, $300/month) and a focus on communications intent & purpose are all critical.

It's really good to see a couple of telecom operators - or at least, certain groups within them - clearly demonstrating a break with the past. Yes, I expect there will need to be some compromises between old and new - but the mere fact that the innovators are being empowered to get things moving, is invigorating. 

Last week's event pretty much made me want to write off the whole industry and let it face the telepocalyptic fires. But I can see a few phoenixes rising, even before the conflagration has finished turning the deadwood to ash.

Interested in WebRTC evolution? Check out Disruptive Analysis' ongoing research. And thanks muchly to the WebRTC Expo team, for recognising me as one of their "WebRTC Pioneers".



One last side-note: another part-telco/part-Internet company, Truphone, was also at the show. As well as touting its multi-local SIMs (something I've mentioned before), it also did a cool WebRTC demo that I've been wanting to see for ages - forcing unfamiliar inbound callers to go via a web interface, and demonstrate they actually knew the called party, by showing themselves as a LinkedIn contact, or a Facebook friend. Think of it as "interruption management" - if I know you on a social network, I'll probably tolerate an unexpected call from you. Anyone else? Sorry, I'm not interested in being "reachable".

Welcome to the "Age of Obfuscation" - with Apple as a major catalyst

Something I've expected to happen for a long time is starting to come true. Driven largely by growing global interest in privacy and security, we should expect an ever-greater number of technologies to try to hide or disguise ("obfuscate" - "render obscure, unclear, or unintelligible") both what they are, and what they're doing.

This goes beyond encryption of data, although that is an important part. Obfuscation does not just scramble the content of something, but either tries to hide its existence entirely, inserts random noise to make analytics unreliable, or pretends to be something else.

Obfuscation can be a deliberate action, or a side-effect of something else, such as a security technology, which then has collateral effects elsewhere. A lot of companies and services depend on monitoring and observing data - and are very "fragile" to their main data-source being switched-off or hidden.

Two things that Apple has done recently stand out:

• iOS8 uses false WiFi IDs when looking for WiFi hotspots ("spoofing MAC addresses"). This means that your device's unique identity is not exposed when your phone/tablet does a scan for available hotspots. It reverts to the real MAC address only when you actually attempt to log onto one of them. This means that various businesses that use "broadcast" MACs will suffer from the obfuscation, for example tracking people walking through retail stores, or other less-salubrious forms of monitoring.
• Also in iOS8 is something called App Extensions. This essentially allows one app to embed another mini-app. For example, a communications app might include a 3rd-party photo-editing capability, and the option to upload a snapshot from a video-call to another 3rd-party social network. This partly overcomes a longstanding Apple limitation on allowing apps to talk to each other - normally they run in closed silos. Android has something roughly similar too. This then also has some interesting obfuscation effects on the network - it makes defining data traffic "belonging to an app" even harder than it is already. Operator's DPI systems might be able to spot the 3rd-party app-in-app doing something with data, but it will become very hard to correctly allocate it, from the user's perspective. If you sell "$5/month Facebook access", then you have to expect Facebook to use all manner of mashups and integrations either on server or the device. 

 (The latter example is something I discuss in the context of "app-based charging" practical limitations, in my new report on mobile broadband business models).

Other examples of obfuscation are also appearing.

Google seems to be succeeding in getting its SPDY web-acceleration framework adopted as the basis of the forthcoming HTTP2, and in any case it is being used not just in Chrome but also IE and Safari as well. Although its main purpose is to improve web-page loading times, it will have some interesting side-effects. Often, web pages create multiple connections to multiple servers, slowing down as each one's URL gets decoded by DNS servers, as well as scrutinised by other boxes in the network. SPDY combines (multiplexes) the various HTTP requests into ore efficient form. In doing so, it also effectively encrypts them and thus hides them from - you guessed it - DPIs, proxies, caches and the like.

In other words, web traffic accelerated with SPDY will "go dark" to ISPs and telcos in the network path, making it much harder to do fine-grained policy management, or perhaps differential charging. As a result, US-based telecoms industry group ATIS has belatedly woken up and started the "Open Web Alliance" and is vainly hoping for telcos to be allowed to implement "SPDY proxies" to re-intermediate themselves. Given everything that's going on with Net Neutrality at the moment, I'd rate their chances of success as very low.

In general, all forms of encryption are on the rise - partly driven by revelations about national security agencies, but also because processor speeds are getting fast enough to routinely encrypt everything anyway. It's hard to argue against it.

But beyond that, I think we're about to see a pushback against data being collected for marketing and advertising purposes. Consumers - and their "advocates" who create devices or other products - are looking at ways to help improve privacy. It seems that often, legislation doesn't work well - or certainly not fast. So I suspect we'll see moves to hide or disguise meta-data, or "pollute" it to near-uselessness.

Maybe we'll have software that automatically clicks random locations on the web, makes unexpected searches, spoofs locations, or does false "likes". Maybe we'll see more app-in-app usage, or "steganography", hiding data encrypted inside other data. We will get more mixing of data flows - as seen in WebRTC, where voice and video streams can be bundled together. And we will see various methods of anonymisation - again, Apple is a major player leading the way with its use of DuckDuckGo as a search engine.

Looking ahead, I also expect to see a lot of data being sent/received through multiple independent paths - perhaps half of your content (or signalling) via WiFi and the rest through cellular - maybe even to different servers or services. Imagine storing half of a document's words on DropBox, and half on Google Drive, blending them only when necessary, on the device.

Various outcomes are likely:

• Marketing and advertising, dependent on tracking various data sources, are going to become less reliable, as they will be working with dirty/hidden/partial/fake/unreliable data. Google and Facebook are also exposed here.
• Governments are going to find interception and interpretation of communications much harder again. 
• Telcos are going to lose a lot of visibility of user data traffic. A growing amount is already encrypted, but further layers of obfuscation are going to increase the problems faced by DPI boxes. False-positives and false-negatives will likely increase, and the practicalities of application/traffic detection or policy-enforcement will get much worse. App-based charging will introduce plenty of arbitrage opportunities. On the other hand it is also possible that some telcos could offer "obfuscation as a service" to improve privacy to customers - perhaps modifying web cookies, for example, or creating "noise" for search etc.
• Developers will be able to create apps that are more private and secure - and perhaps cheaper for end-users in terms of data charges. There will be lots of interesting middleware providers or opportunities for "obfuscation enablers"

Welcome to the Age of Obfuscation, where everything online is not necessarily what it seems. And where data might well be Big, but it may also be polluted.

The old-world telco mindset lives on. IMS advocates still don't "get it"

I spent last week at the IIR NextGen Service Platforms conference in Munich, featuring a combination of material on Telecom APIs, WebRTC and "Legacy Network Evolution". Much of the emphasis was on service innovation for telcos. As well as myself, both Alan Quayle & Martin Geddes were attending and presenting.

By the end of the day, all three of us were muttering under our breaths - and being considerably more vocal on Twitter.

The main problem that irked us:

It isn't just legacy networks that need to evolve in telcos, it's legacy thinking.

In short, much of the day was taken up by presentations and discussions that combined myopia and lame excuses.

"We can't do anything with WebRTC unless we ask the regulators first"

"Our brand would suffer if we launched a service that didn't work perfectly"

"IMS means the end of silos [for communications]"

"French consumers are tired of downloading apps. They'll use embedded RCS"

"IMS will allow the creation of an ecosystem of OTT players"

"Consumers demand QoS"

"People would use more data if it was free - or if someone else paid for it"

"It brings universal reachability"

"3G was about Skype & Whatsapp. 4G will go beyond those silos, to Joyn"

"Everything can be linked to the phone number"

"We can do all the API & developer relationship stuff ourselves in-house"

"IMS is central to WebRTC"

"VoLTE will increase production costs for telephony, but we're making a bet on IMS as a platfom for other stuff"

"WebRTC is just another access"

There remains a worrying disconnect between market realities and the wishful-thinking, blinkered views still endemic in the telecoms world, especially, it seems, among those with a "telecoms academic" background.

• A lack of focus on real customer requirements & behaviour. There remains no understanding of why people like fragmented applications or why they are often ambivalent to QoS.
• A failure to recognise that "the web has won" and that using the web/cloud/apps domain - and business/development models - is the only way forward for telcos.
• A rigid belief in the primacy of network QoS, despite (a) not understanding the limits of network maths/performance/wireless/coordination, (b) not understanding that QoS value is very use-case dependent, (c) not understanding that QoE is driven by many other variables than the network
• Specifically, a rather charming-but-scary belief that users will choose a less-attractive app that always works well, rather than a better/cooler/cheaper app that only works well most of the time
• A belief that usage of services will gain wide adoption merely because of interoperability (usually with a reference to SMS ancient history)
• A complete refusal to engage with areas like behavioural psychology, social dynamics, user interaction models, purpose/Intenet and, above all, design
• An inability to understand concepts such as "intention" and purpose - ie that increasingly the value of communications is why you communicate & what you're hoping to achieve, not the actual transport of bits that ensues
• Ignoring the use of non-carrier networks in the enterprise, 3rd-party unmanaged WiFi, home etc, even though statistically they are becoming much more common, especially for video-type communications.
• Overlooking the realities of the device marketplace - eg convincing Apple to implement anything it disdains, or equally trying to convince manufacturers of unlocked "vanilla" Android devices to implement software, which adds cost/time, yet appears unappreciated by users at point-of-purchase.
• Taking a very traditional telco view of things like "reachability", without considering that people don't always want to be "reached".
• Continued repetition of stupid cliches like "OTT" and "dumb pipe". These are usually a good indicator of cluelessness, unless prefaced with "so-called" and eyeball-rolling. I'm tempted to say that their utterance should be considered gross incompetence and merit instant dismissal.

Overall, it was pretty disheartening. Some of what I heard could be interpreted as comforting mantras chanted by old-school network engineers worried about their jobs. While that is understandable, it doesn't help the industry actually do what it needs to do - build platforms and services in the cloud, drop most of the QoS mythology, make sensible decisions about partnerships, and act fast.

Neither Alan nor Martin nor myself advocate that telcos turn into "pipes" - but equally, they have to identify the future sources of value in communications services if they are to remain relevant. This is about context, purpose, intention and "softer" things like that - delivered via APIs or rev-share deals, or on a freemium basis. "Interoperability" is not a consumer value in itself. It might help for some services, and it might hinder others. We all presented about things to do with voice or messaging that add value to the basic "telephony" proposition. But instead, we heard about VoLTE & RCS (!) as some sort of magical saviours that will help telcos "beat the OTTs" without any explanation of why that should be the case, and what real-world human use-cases will be impacted.

One speaker admitted that VoLTE (with SR-VCC) will increase the per-minute "production cost" of basic telephony. It's a brave CFO that takes the bet he offered - that IMS as a platform would generate revenues from new as-yet-unimagined services -  in spite of the almost-guaranteed decline in telephony value over the next few years.

As for WebRTC, quite a lot of speakers seemed to think its main role will be extending out VoLTE or RCS as a sort-of cheaper/easier softphone alternative. Fair enough, it might be useful for running a VoLTE extension on a WiFi tablet. (RCS - well, let's just say I had a new zombie slide, so you can guess my views. My intro presentation here & WebRTC workshop here). On the positive side, it seems that a lot of telcos are at least trialling or prototyping WebRTC, although most are probably too tied up with getting basic VoLTE deployed and working to worry about a WebRTC Phase 2 extension to it.

In my view, it normally takes the telecoms industry 4 years to spot a good idea, 4 years to implement it, and another 4 years to realise it was too late. For WebRTC, those numbers seem to have been cut to 2 years, which ranks as an improvement of sorts.

I'm off to Atlanta for the big WebRTC Expo & Conference next week, where I'll be moderating a number of the service provider panels. I suspect we'll get to rehash some of the same arguments about IMS again, although hopefully the fervent & innovative web/IT-centric atmosphere will permeate a few telco-academia brainwashed skulls and osmose into the legacy mindsets about service creation....