WebRTC has no Edge in Media over Others

Let's say it loud and clear: WebRTC is pure VoIP. It does nothing better than the rest of the pack. How I sometimes feel about experience and expertise in WebRTC:

Ever heard of WebRTC being better than Skype because it works with less bandwidth? How about the one saying it is the solution for the NSA snooping? Or that it works better on mobile than other solutions because it is embedded in the operating system and the browser? None of it is true. At times, it is even the opposite. I am still amazed by the amount of misinformation out there. A rule of thumb here: when it comes to media, WebRTC doesn't provide a technology that is superior or unique that others don't already have or can add relatively easily. Some things to note in this regard:

• Codecs in WebRTC are negotiated via SDP. This is the same mechanism used by SIP
• The mandatory voice codecs for WebRTC are G.711 and Opus
  • G.711 is the same crap as all the rest of the pack (least common denominator). In most cases, when you see gateways for WebRTC to anything else – this is the narrowband voice quality you should be expecting
  • Opus is too new, so it might be better than the rest of them. That said, there are those who are closing the gap already (Linphone and Audio Codes to be more specific)
  • Not a lot of bandwidth is required for good voice, even in narrowband. While WebRTC does have an edge, it usually requires pure software coding while other codecs may need less of that at the moment
• The mandatory video codecs for WebRTC are… still undecided. Either VP8 or H.264. H.264 is the industry standard – everything that looks remotely good in higher resolutions or frame-rates is H.264
  • This includes Skype as far as I know (they shifted to VP8, but I assume they retracted since their acquisition by Microsoft)
  • VP8 has no real technology benefit over H.264. Those that say otherwise may be technically correct, but I have yet to meet a single person who can see the visual difference between a VP8 to an H.264 video stream
• The network magic? How you deal with jitter, latencies, packet loss, echo, etc?
  • A known industry problem
  • Every vendor has his own secret sauce for it. Some better than others
  • There are better solutions than the one presented in WebRTC
  • There are worse solutions than the one presented in WebRTC
  • Translation: it is on par with the industry standard

So just remember: WebRTC is a media engine. There are other media engines that are in the same class when it comes to quality, but none of them are:

• Free (BSD)
• Maintained by top engineers as a day job
• Wrapped and packed nicely into a huge amount of web browsers with a Java Script API on top of it