WebRTC is experiencing “The SIP Cycle”
Last week, I was interviewed by some folks researching the WebRTC market on behalf of University in Scotland. Answering their questions and the follow-up discussion really forced me to crystalize many of the ideas that I have had bouncing around in my head since I was first introduced to the technology about 18 months ago.
One of the key questions they asked was about “barriers to adoption”. In repose, I said that WebRTC is going through the “SIP Cycle” that SIP went through when it was first proposed.
Many of the objections being raised about WebRTC is some of the SIP community are all the same as those raised against SIP by the TDM community all those years ago. Such items as lack of standardization, the peer-to-peer nature of it, and the lack of controls necessary to make it a “real” communication protocol were all voiced as “problems” with SIP. I’m sure that I could find some old slides from the late nineties that showed why SIP could not replace TDM telephony and just replace SIP with WebRTC and then replace TDM with SIP, and have a whole bunch of new slides that could easily be presented today.
I’ll have to dig up an old 3.5” drive to start reviewing those old slides.