Re: [rtcweb] Agenda time request for draft-marjou-rtcweb-audio-codecs-for-interop-01

[Hadriel Kaplan <[e-mail]>]

On Mar 13, 2013, at 11:53 AM, Ron <[e-mail]> wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 10:37:45AM -0400, Bogineni, Kalyani wrote:
>> There are 6.4 billion cellular connections worldwide.
>> 
>> http://www.3gpp.org/3GPP-Family-2012-Statistics
> 
> Sure.  And why do you think that someone with one of those devices,
> who wanted to call someone on the legacy network that didn't have
> a WebRTC service, would want to do it by going via a WebRTC gateway
> service, that they would presumably have to pay extra for, and would
> suffer extra hops of latency to use (even without transcoding), when
> they could just, you know, call them on their cell phone normally … ?

Well I can think of one reason: it's a lot cheaper, when traveling internationally/roaming.  I.e., it's a lot cheaper today to use my cell phone with Skype-out on Wifi when I'm in another country, than it is to pay my cell carrier's price for international roaming charges... even though Skype also charges money for their Skype-out service.  But if my carrier offered me WebRTC-calls at a price closer to Skype's, for this roaming usage scenario, I'd use that instead.

But I'm not suggesting that means we do/do-not need to mandate other codecs - just pointing out there is a use-case for WebRTC on mobile phones making calls to other cell phones and the PSTN.  Personally I don't think the big fish for mobile happens to be *browsers* using WebRTC, but rather web-based resident *apps* based on things like PhoneGap/Titanium/etc.  But I'm not a market analyst for mobile, and I'd expect people in that space to know more about it.

-hadriel