After TADHack London we all headed to the WebRTC Summit. On the Monday afternoon the available TADHack winners presented to the conference. The big change for me at the conference is the number of real-world case studies being discussed. Not by RTC geeks, vendors or industry insiders; but regular web/IT people. I highlight Philipe Vaysacc from Groupama’s presentation, as a great example.

A couple of other highlights included Deutsche Telekom showing some interesting comparative results on the performance of WebRTC Opus and VoLTE, which jives with my experiences. And Tim Panton gave a nice summary on the role WebRTC can play in the IoiT (Internet of insecure Things).

Philippe Vayssac, Chief Innovation Officer, from Groupama presented a case study of granvillage, which uses XiVO as the telephony core. A social networking tool for small businesses in France, provided by an insurance company – France is often a special case. They used WebRTC ONLY from tablets as they could assume the video and audio would be set-up correctly. While the industry gets all excited about Apple finally admitting to working on WebRTC, no surprise there. The reality is most desktops are not configured for communications.

Peter Coates present on Code4Health and open source within NHS England. I connected Peter with the confidant team from Founders and Coders, fingers crossed they’ve found a route to market for their hack.

Joachim Stegmann, Director Future Communications, presented some interesting comparative results on the use of WebRTC over mobile data and VoLTE. Generally I find WebRTC delivers a better performance, and where coverage issues arise the glitches are a little more significant than with VoLTE. With Opus 1.1.2 this will improve compared to the results presented. It was nice to see a Telco showing their networks support non-QoS voice. I’ve given workshops where some ‘telco thought police’ refused to believe this was even possible.  3GPP / GSMA should have adopted Opus for VoLTE / RCS years ago, but that’s another example of why the industry’s standard and trade body need radical change. And anyone who claims potential patent claims mean Opus can not be considered is just being silly.

And finally. I’ll not get into a rant on all the weak-minded marketing BS on IoT, IoS, IoiT (Internet of Things aka Internet of Silos (as things and businesses that make things don’t share) aka Internet of insecure Things). Rather, I’ll point your attention to the presentation Tim Panton gave on the problems WebRTC solves in IoT. You can also see Tim’s hack from TADHack Paris last year which addresses this specific issue. He’s right.

Overall WebRTC continues to make slow but steady process. The WebRTC choir appear a little more subdued, but reveling in the the complexity being created. Little by little we see WebRTC technology popping up in everyday applications and services, the limitations being real-world not technology related (e.g. Groupama limiting the WebRTC component to tablets). Hence why hackathons are so important as they are where technology and the real-world collide with a big dollop of fun / creativity mixed in 🙂