Expanding Service Providers’ Reach With WebRTC - “Quickly brush up the old and focus on the new” - “WebRTC is much more than a technology for operators” - “Proper enablers are more important than fully standardized services” - “Just do it – it’s easier than ever to innovate!” Presented at the 14th Annual Broadband World Forum (BBWF) 2014 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands

1. – strictly confidential, confidential, internal, public – 10/22/2014 1
EXPANDING PROVIDERS’ REACH WITH WEBRTC
SEBASTIAN SCHUMANN, SLOVAK TELEKOM
22. October 2014. Amsterdam, The Netherlands
FUTURE DISRUPTION

2. SCOPE
Expanding Service Providers’ Reach With WebRTC
 “Quickly brush up the old and focus on the new”
 “WebRTC is much more than a technology for operators”
 “Proper enablers are more important than fully standardized services”
 “Just do it – it’s easier than ever to innovate!”
Sebastian Schumann: “Expanding Service Providers’ Reach With WebRTC”, 14th BBWF October 2014, Amsterdam, NL 2
@s_schumann
Feedback is welcome, get in touch during/after the event!

3. SLOVAK TELEKOM
 Former fixed & mobile incumbent (merger in 2010), Zoznam, Posam, DIGI
 Diverse service portfolio (fixed/mobile network and communications
services, Internet access + content, data services, CPE, ICT services
(data center + cloud), radio/TV broadcasting, call center services, …)
The major shareholder is Deutsche Telekom AG.
Successful deployments in SEE as well as in DT group:
 One of the biggest national-wide deployment of NGN technology in
Europe in 2004, whole city migrated to all-IP NGN in 2007
 Fixed network IMS migration to be finished in 2014
 Leader in IPTV, offering hybrid sat TV (s. 2009) & OTT app (s. 2012)
 Extensive FTTx deployments (360k households)
 First nation-wide 4G/LTE network (s. 2013)
Sebastian Schumann: “Expanding Service Providers’ Reach With WebRTC”, 14th BBWF October 2014, Amsterdam, NL 3
Slovak Telekom Group is the telecoms market leader in Slovakia

4. “Quickly brush up the old and focus on the new”
Sebastian Schumann: “Expanding Service Providers’ Reach With WebRTC”, 14th BBWF October 2014, Amsterdam, NL 4

5. WEBRTC “OPTIONS” – EVOLVE AND INNOVATE
WHAT CAN THE TECHNOLOGY BE USED FOR?
Sebastian Schumann: “Expanding Service Providers’ Reach With WebRTC”, 14th BBWF October 2014, Amsterdam, NL 5
Integration Options
Adding the “Web” to “RTC” Adding “RTC” to the “Web”
WebRTC WebRTC
? ?

6. “WebRTC is much more than a technology for operators”
Sebastian Schumann: “Expanding Service Providers’ Reach With WebRTC”, 14th BBWF October 2014, Amsterdam, NL 6

7. SO WHAT IS WEBRTC FOR OPERATORS?
 For many, “adding WebRTC” means adding voice/video to a service and have this service in the browser
 Due to Telecom’s business’ history “communications” = “telephony”
 Is it important?
 Yes, because it comes with certain presumptions for the service and also in discussions
 It comes with less defined constraints than VoLTE/RCS, operators sometimes forget that!
 When WebRTC is discussed within operator units, they are almost always discussed with legacy assumptions
in mind  WebRTC is much more
 Comparison with legacy services (IMS/RCS/VoLTE/OTT) needs to answer what they actually are
 Technologies, services, concepts, ways of thinking?
 “VoLTE is just telephony”  Telephony in the browser
 “It’s a technology, not a service” often cited, deductions from that statement are in fact an iceberg
Sebastian Schumann: “Expanding Service Providers’ Reach With WebRTC”, 14th BBWF October 2014, Amsterdam, NL 7

8. DEVELOPING OPERATOR STRATEGIES
 WebRTC can be one of the technologies to accelerate development and decrease costs, if operators want to
build “OTT services” services that are:
 Access independent/network independent/location independent
 Use a software front-end (app/web)  Completely new experience in how they deliver voice in the application
 A separate “OTT strategy” does not make sense
 Is has to be elaborated per service how it should be exposed, delivered, and made accessible
 Current “new” operator services such as VoLTE and RCS are “old Telco services ”
 Stand-alone services, no initial and easy integration considered, QoS over QoE, etc.
 New thinking needs to come with building things on the web, not yet clear everywhere!
Sebastian Schumann: “Expanding Service Providers’ Reach With WebRTC”, 14th BBWF October 2014, Amsterdam, NL 8
WebRTC

9. “Proper enablers are more important than fully standardized services”
Sebastian Schumann: “Expanding Service Providers’ Reach With WebRTC”, 14th BBWF October 2014, Amsterdam, NL 9

10. THE IMPORTANCE OF APPROACHING SERVICES CORRECTLY
 Important to affect current planning and new services. Do not think about new communications services, but
 evolve existing communications services and innovate on UX/QoE
 embed features in new services (own, partnering)
 Service updates can include “modernized interfaces”, but need to go beyond
 Adding “Web” to existing products means they are defined, and mostly limited
 Integration where it makes sense is more important than a “pure web dialer”
 The WebRTC paradigm introduces a new "way of thinking“ that has often not even started
 The "front-end design/functions” defines services now
 The back-end is completely irrelevant
Sebastian Schumann: “Expanding Service Providers’ Reach With WebRTC”, 14th BBWF October 2014, Amsterdam, NL 10
Interfaces/services need to be built flexibly and deployed capabilities need to be
reusable and added quickly and frequently to different products.

11. NEW ARCHITECTURAL REQUIREMENTS
 The WebRTC paradigm introduces the need for new architectural requirements, also for operators
 Every service or integration going beyond telephony or not requiring the full subset of its features should have
a prior discussion about proper architecture (back-end enabler)
 Telephony: IMS/MMTel/VoLTE vs. lightweight open-source alternatives – almost exclusively SIP
 Non-telephony: Own backend, libraries, protocol alternatives (XMPP, REST/JSON)
 Case-by-case decision, not just use because it is there (efficiency, suitability)
 For everything that is not telephony, alternatives most likely much more suitable
 The discussion about WebRTC & IMS should not be at the beginning, but the end of any consideration
 Get a gateway if legacy is important (incl. identity, integration etc.), if not chose depending on your resources
 Choose your vendor wisely, WebRTC often comes with the IMS and that will have impact on your creativity
 Good open-source products available, client-side JavaScript knowledge often enough to get started!
Sebastian Schumann: “Expanding Service Providers’ Reach With WebRTC”, 14th BBWF October 2014, Amsterdam, NL 11

12. “Just do it – it’s easier than ever to innovate!”
Sebastian Schumann: “Expanding Service Providers’ Reach With WebRTC”, 14th BBWF October 2014, Amsterdam, NL 12

13. USE IN-HOUSE RESOURCES –HOWEVER LITTLE YOU HAVE
 Use cases or prototypes can be developed so much faster than before
 Support for building instead of talking, especially for the “renegades” , trying to inflict change for the better
 Especially useful to proof that IMS is not always needed if the use case does not justify it
 Much easier to show what WebRTC is at first hand
 I once did a presentation from Joburg to Bratislava via Amsterdam (approx. > 10000 km, phys. delay approx. 50 ms)
 People will be stunned to perceive it themselves if they all of a sudden know the people that built it
 Prototyping means learning
 We have developed various prototypes and every single challenge was also a lesson learned (some shared today)
 Use NT and IT resources, both are needed. Expect also innovations from purely IT side
Sebastian Schumann: “Expanding Service Providers’ Reach With WebRTC”, 14th BBWF October 2014, Amsterdam, NL 13

14. PRACTICAL BACKUP: WE ARE DOOGFOODING
 Slovak Telekom has implemented a PoC not connected to legacy telephony, actively used by employees
 A WebRTC gateway RfQ on IMS and show telephony would be easy, but doesn’t have much value yet
 We developed a (simple but yet) contextual web application
 Sent E-mails contain signature to web portal (address built using E-mail as identifier), contact employees
 People can be contacted and also notified out-of-band using various channels, owner/guest not equal
 No telephony dial-out: Faster, easy b/c no legacy boundaries such as billing, integration, approval
 No complex account setup: Address confirmation using received hash/token for mapping
 No one-size-fits-all: Many features consciously omitted (directory, collaboration, conferencing)
 One application doing one thing well and which contains only those features required
Sebastian Schumann: “Expanding Service Providers’ Reach With WebRTC”, 14th BBWF October 2014, Amsterdam, NL 14

15. SUMMARY
 It is important to understand our heritage and acknowledge who pays the bills for now
 Main business still legacy  IMS architecture often “a given”
 Telephony and “boring use cases” need to be on board
 Modernization of current voice service important
 This is a pretty straight forward path, many obstacles are being worked on (as Victor presented)
 Most of the operator voice back-end is IP based now, but simply attaching “a WebRTC front-end” won’t do
 Less ubiquitous, but more targeted applications will replace telephony general purpose communications
use case by use case
 Flexible re-useable capabilities exposed through simple APIs are tremendously important
 Standardized core technologies (HTML/CSS/JS, Objective-C, Java), but not services
 Standardized interfaces (REST API w/ doc/SDK is enough) trumps complex E2E scenarios
Sebastian Schumann: “Expanding Service Providers’ Reach With WebRTC”, 14th BBWF October 2014, Amsterdam, NL 15

16. THANK YOU.
Sebastian Schumann
Application & Platform Innovation | Slovak Telekom, a.s.
 Sebastian.Schumann@telekom.sk
@s_schumann
 +421 903 419 345

17. ATTRIBUTION
Refresh designed by Alex Auda Samora from the Noun Project
House designed by James Christopher from the Noun Project
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