Six use cases for actively testing a WebRTC connection before making a call. Presentation delivered at CommCon 2019 by Lennart Schulte, callstats.io.

1. How Active WebRTC Connectivity Tests
Are Improving User Experiences
Lennart Schulte

2. Who am I
● Diploma in computer science, networking technology from
RWTH Aachen Germany
○ TCP measurements in virtualized environments
● PhD in same area from Aalto University, Finland
○ large scale active end-to-end mobile network measurements
○ IETF
● callstats.io for last 2.5 years
○ senior software engineer, analytics team lead
○ W3C

3. callstats.io: The WebRTC Monitoring Leader
● Founded in 2014 by IETF and W3C authors
● Integrated into leading CPaaS platforms and SDKs
● Backed by leading venture capital firms
● Over 1B collected WebRTC data points each month
● Customers in different industries

4. ● Operations and architects
● Product manager and developers
● Agent supervisor
● Agent or user
Who uses monitoring

5. Call center
Agent
Media
gateway
Caller
Caller
Caller
WebRTC Telephony
Setup differences

6. Market place
User maybe SFU
Caller
Caller
Caller
WebRTC WebRTC
Setup differences

7. Team collaboration
Team
member
maybe SFU
WebRTC
Team
member
Team
member
Team
member
WebRTC
Setup differences

8. Product manager, developer
● Group of users
● Regions
Operations and architects
● Reachability, location
● Server performance, scale
End-user
● Establishing connectivity
● Losing connectivity, quality
Agent supervisor
● Agent performance
● Sites
Challenges

9. ● User is not making calls?
● Too little data to infer problem?
○ time based problem
○ region based problem
→ Use users as probes
● User is bothering customer support all the time?
→ Debug options for users
Passive monitoring great, but what if ..

10. ● Javascript library, runs in the browser
○ based on WebRTC data channels
● currently runs against our TURN servers
○ can be run against your TURN servers as well
● Performs active network measurements against our servers
○ Connectivity, ICE, RTT, loss, throughput
Our active monitoring

11. Our active monitoring
our TURN
a Call

12. User joining a conference call
● “Will I be able to make a call with sufficient quality?”
● “Can I make a call at all?”
● “Last call wasn’t great”
→ “Is the problem on my side?”
Use case #1

13. Network test page network.callstats.io
Use case #1

14. User always available
● Contact center agent
● know before any call if everything is working
○ especially important when travelling, WFH, cafes, public places
Use case #2

15. Amazon Connect
Contact Control Panel
(CCP)
Use case #2

16. User always available
● Team collaboration: 8x8, Slack, RingCentral, five9
● Customer support: “Is the quality for a user consistent?”
→ data to check if performance is sufficient, more context
Use case #3

17. Agent supervisor
● “Can I make sure that my agents will provide good quality calls?”
→ take agents offline if quality is consistently bad,
have them attend less important calls
Use case #4

18. Use case #4

19. Contact center infrastructure - new site
● “Is the location good to reach the user base I care about?”
● “Multiple available ISPs, which to choose?”
● “Is there a performance variation in time?”
→ Site surveys
Use case #5

20. 33
Site survey
Use case #5

21. Infrastructure monitoring
● run automated tests against infra
● from actual user locations instead of cloud
→ reachability, performance (not load/regression tests)
Use case #6

22. Conclusion
● Active tests are useful
○ Debug options for users
○ More “personalized” infrastructure monitoring
○ Insights for customer support and supervisors
● Not a replacement for passive monitoring
○ supplementary - when call data is unavailable/insufficient

23. Thank you!