RIP IMS
If you haven’t read Chad’s break up, then you should. It is touching. And true. And the comments on it are great.
We’ve had a ball at the Expo event, but that last day got me pissed off – it was the service providers track, with many of its vendors suggesting their IMS systems should be hooked up to WebRTC in order to save it. it being WebRTC. What a joke.
The sessions were focused on FUD. On what WebRTC doesn’t do. Or doesn’t have. It isn’t stable. It is too new. There’s no reliability in it. No redundancy. No high availability. No server side. No nothing. Yes. We have IMS. It is great. It is here. It is proven. It gives all that is missing in WebRTC and more. Let’s give WebRTC a life by connecting it to IMS cores. Let’s make it all better.
My ears were on flames. Those who know me know it is hard for me to stay put without shouting back in such cases. I held myself still instead of making a ruckus. I was brave.
So here I am, all cooled down, but still pissed off. Had to write it to get it off my system.
I come from the VoIP industry. As Chad, I also delved into IMS, and as Chad, I said my goodbyes. I have built signaling systems, explained why they are so important, and now I end up explaining why they are needed, but not the center of the universe any longer.
We people who come from the VoIP and telecom world need to start understanding that WebRTC isn’t our game. It isn’t meant for us, and we aren’t the subject matter experts in it. We need to take our graying hair elsewhere, and let the kids of the web world tell us how it is done. I feel old.
If you want to use WebRTC today, you need to think in the terms of the internet. Your best friends are probably Node.js, Redis and Mongo DB or some other web technologies that are unheard of in the enterprise and telecom. WebRTC not scalable? Telecom are the only ones who know how to do it and IMS shows the path? Give me a break. Facebook, Twitter, LINE, Whatsapp and many others show that the web can scale much better than Telecom – and can do it way faster. WebRTC was born for that – not for telecom.
These services may fail from time to time, but so does telecom services.
Get over it. Communication belongs to the web and not to the telecom world. Time to see how IMS adapts to it.
In this game of IMS and WebRTC, it is hard to tell who’s the dog and who’s the tail, but in the end, it is WebRTC that wags IMS around.