By: Arvind Rangarajan

By the end of 2019, 6.7 billion devices are forecast to support WebRTC with 2 billion active consumer users and 900 million business users, according to an April 2015 update of Disruptive Analysis’ WebRTC Market Status & Forecasts Report. WebRTC is one of the most discussed enterprise technologies today, as its ability to enable browser-to-browser communications for voice, video and real-time unified communications unlocks a host of new and more seamless ways for enterprises to interact with customers, partners, suppliers and others.

According to Disruptive Analysis’ analyst Dean Bubley, there are more than 10 telecom operators with some variation of commercial implementation involving WebRTC, with several others that have well-advanced plans and prototypes. How positively or negatively WebRTC will impact telcos remains to be seen, but the technology is clearly serving as a catalyst for change across the industry.

Initial WebRTC-enabled applications explored by enterprises have for the most part focused on those delivering an enhanced customer experience through capabilities such as click-to-call. However, businesses increasingly view WebRTC as a way to extend real-time Unified Communications (UC) beyond the confines of an enterprise. This is significant, as telcos have an opportunity to leverage WebRTC to accelerate more rapid adoption of Unified Communications services by enterprises and their employees – in turn allowing telcos to sell more UC seats to business customers, earn more revenue and deliver a richer user experience.



For telcos seeking evaluating WebRTC and how the technology can be leveraged to sell Unified Communications, there are several benefits to consider.

Improves The User Experience

The future of work rests squarely on delivering a single user experience that is highly customizable to meet the diverse needs of telcos’ various market segments (micro-business, mid-market, large enterprise), verticals (hospitality, education, government, retail, healthcare, etc.), and device (smartphones, tablets, desktops, etc.).

WebRTC enables telcos to customize their UC offers for a particular business need by offering an additional channel of communication as part of their UC suite. One of the biggest benefits of WebRTC technology is video calling and video conferencing capability directly from the browser. In the past, video communication required sophisticated devices to be available at both the ends of the call due to interoperability and codec requirements. Also, these devices were quite expensive to get and required maintenance and support. WebRTC user today can quickly start a video call by simply clicking on a button/link on the browser without the need for expensive equipment.Simplifying this communications channel allows enterprises to improve customer service by adding a rich media communication experience within their Website, email communications and mobile apps as the solution enables real-time, browser-based video and voice calling. As a result, customer support and time-to-resolution are improved.