News: WhatsApp pushes the WebRTC

In February WhatsApp and Gmail joined the 1 billion active user club. Whatsapp also announced that it would waive its yearly $0.99 fee. There are also more and more rumours that WhatsApp will add video calling soon to the application.

At the same time, according to a newly released report from Exact Ventures, the market for WebRTC gateways (product and service revenues) is expected to grow to nearly $900 million in 2020. WebRTC GW are becoming the bridges which can interconnect OTTs, Enterprise solutions and Telcos.

WebRTC Interoperability

WebRTC GW allows to combine the power of VoLTE with a dedicated information system. Typical example can be a customer care system (e.g. insurance company) connected directly over WebRTC to the end users’ VoLTE handsets. Why the operator should use a handset herself when she can directly see the pictures/videos from your car crash, and the system will store the data along with the call itself in your customer history? Sure there are thousands of other applications starting with health care services and ending with m2m. But the idea remains the same – we want to integrate all communication channels and we want to work with the data later. And this is magnified in the business and industry. According to Exact Ventures even the traditionally consumer-focused web properties like Facebook and WhatsApp are looking to expand their presence in business communications.

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I like statistics. We shouldn’t take them too seriously but sometimes they can reveal quite interesting facts. Thanks to these pages I have my own data which I can try to interpret 🙂

News: Top 10 IoT Technologies

Yes I’ve also seen plenty of similar articles 🙂 The last of them is Gartner Identifies the Top 10 Internet of Things Technologies for 2017 and 2018. What are these 10 Technologies?

• IoT Security
• IoT Analytics
• IoT Device (Thing) Management
• Low-Power, Short-Range IoT Networks
• Low-Power, Wide-Area Networks
• IoT Processors
• IoT Operating Systems
• Event Stream Processing
• IoT Platforms
• IoT Standards and Ecosystems

No real surprise, right? Simply all the things which we need to solve or address to get it running.

Well, I’d have 2 more points – Tracing & Troubleshooting and Software Defined Networking.

News: IoT @ home

Do you remember SETI@home? It was 1999 and many many people were helping Berkeley to search for aliens 🙂 Later there were quite a few similar projects which were using the computational power of our computers.

These days we can use so much more than just CPU and memory. Berkeley (Berkeley Seismological Lab) has come with another project called MyShake. Its goal is to build a worldwide seismic network. Practically their MyShake app use the ability of our smart phones to recognize earthquake shaking exploiting their sensors. When the shaking fits the vibrational profile of an earthquake, the app sends the anonymous information to the central system that confirms the location and magnitude of the quake.

MyShake

The goal of the project is to use the data to reduce the effects of earthquakes on us as individuals, and our society as a whole. MyShake also provides users with information about recent earthquakes around the world and significant global historical earthquakes.

Berkeley works on the project along with Deutch Telekom (T-Mobile Germany) which also presented the app on the MWC. More information can be found on myshake.berkeley.edu.

From our – realtime communication – point of view this is a great example how the IoT is coming. Each device can be via some app plugged into the IoT network. In the future we don’t need to limit ourselves to smartphones only. It is simple enough for the proof of concept, but static monitoring devices can be even better. Why not to use devices from Low power networks? For some of them (e.g. pipelines) this information can be priceless anyway. On the other hand your smart phone can still do a great job when the real earthquake comes. It could then work in the similar way as the avalanche beacons do – just in more intelligent way. It can report if you were affected e.g. by a collapsed building, if you are still alive, send your GPS coordinates … and in order to maximize the battery life, it can do it over the LPN.

 

News: WebRTC – the way to go

WebRTC was a buzz word a few years ago. The cool demonstrations lead to doubts of many operators and communication companies about their own solution. But this also meant a lot of expectations which couldn’t be fulfilled immediately. WebRTC is a technology not a solution. To introduce it in mobile networks when we go in detail is not without challenges. Anyway the WebRTC is (for someone) slowly gaining its momentum and there are quite a few trials already.

Would you be interested in the GSMA view how to implement the WebRTC in the mobile networks’ context check this whitepaper out –  GSMA WebRTC to complement IP Communication Services.

GSMA – Typical vendor gateway implementation example