WebRTC is the foundation for modern RTC (Real Time Communication). Based in already well-known technologies, it does not provide major advances from the technical point of view.
SCALABLA is heavily based in WebRTC so its progress beyond the state of the art is not related to improvements in communications, but in the way this communication capabilities are made available.
RTC is in general very hard to implement and very costly and most providers (if not all) decide to give access to their communication capabilities in a very strict way. Major players in the RTC market, like Skype, Hangouts, Zoom or GotoMeeting, expose an application with more or less capabilities, which in the end is the same model proposed by the Telephone Service. They all have common characteristics:
* They all identify terminal or user with an ID meaningful only within their platform. Call it phone number, skype ID, google user, etc.
* They don’t interoperate, so to persons that want to talk must have an ID.
* They don’t integrate. Communication capabilities are only accessible through their application and cannot be used embedded in other applications
SCALABLA model is not based in a stand-alone application, but in offering the raw communication capabilities to developers, so they can integrate within their own applications. Within this model the users won’t be aware of a separate ID for their communications, as it happens now with Skype or Hangouts. They’ll just perceive the conversation capability as a native part of the web.
SCALABLA proposal is an important breakthrough in the RTC ecosystem as it changes the way user access to conversation. Now users of the web needs to go to acquire an ID within the communication platform and manage themselves how and when to access other participants. With SCALABLA this happens in a natural way, like in the face-to-face scenario and users just talk in a seamless way while they browse de web.
