A new report paints a positive picture for WebRTC, but the technology is not without its challenges as companies like Google, Facebook and Twilio seek to make it the industry standard for real-time communications.
A recent report by Persistence Market Research outlines several reasons why WebRTC adoption should grow in the next couple years.
First, WebRTC is free and available worldwide, making it affordable and accessible for developers of all types that need to include real-time communications. WebRTC also is cross-platform, giving it added universiality.
With heightened concern about security recently, WebRTC also is attracting attention for its encryption by default. While many VoIP and UC platforms offer encryption, not all come with it enabled out of the box. WebRTC has encryption at its core, making it better suited for firms that worry about the security of their communications services.
Further, the report found that WebRTC can adapt to various network conditions and is interoperable with VoIP and UC solutions, making it easier to integrate with existing communications infrastructure.
The report says that retail and healthcare are two industries with high demand for WebRTC as direct communication with customers is of immense importance in these industries.
WebRTC is not without its challenges, though. One key restraint with WebRTC, the report noted, was that it is associate with the public internet and therefore suffers from a lack of service guarantees; if there is a network slowdown, WebRTC breaks.
While WebRTC does suffer from the same quality of service issues that other real-time communication technologies that use the public internet face, this is not the big stumbling block that it might be. Since WebRTC is an open standard, a number of firms have already rallied around the technology to fix most issues with the technology that might hinder adoption. There are already companies that offer quality of service guarantees for WebRTC for a price, and other firms also have come on the stage to offer things like easier integration and plugins when browser support is not available.
The promise of WebRTC is huge, even as some of the kinks are being worked out.
