The Week that was in WebRTC: Gateways

What a week… just when I complain about gateways – they get announced en mass.

I recently published my first post in UC Strategies. Being a unified communication domain, I decided to complain there about the fact that a WebRTC gateway strategy is nice but not enough.

As if that wasn't a reminder enough, we've been bombarded by 3 press releases about WebRTC gateways this week:

• Huawei announces a WebRTC gateway – focused on IMS and RCS – naturally an "industry first"
• GENBAND introduces a gateway of their own called SPiDR – this one is the "industry's most comprehensive"
• Requestec adds WebRTC to their Zenon gateway – with support of WebRTC, SIP and Flash - they offer "industry leading no download video conferencing and collaboration services"

That's a nice list of industry first/leading/comprehensive, but it begs the question – how can that be when there are some other WebRTC gateways out there?

The ones I am aware of are:

• Doubango Telecom, offering a WebRTC to SIP gateway, and an open source one while we're at it
• Mavenir, who announced their gateway a week or two ahead of Huawei's "industry first", for IMS
• Thrupoint, who have shown their WebRTC to SIP gateway last year already
• And then there's Acme Packet/Oracle, with their SBC (which is a kind of a gateway) that supports… WebRTC and IMS for half a year now

Know any other gateway vendor with WebRTC that I've missed somehow?

Anyone else who wants to say how hard it is to interoperate with SIP when we already have 7 different gateways out there?

Oh... and yes... WebRTC infrastructure is tricky (my contribution this week to NoJitter), but a gateway isn't what I have in mind as the solution to it.