The announcement today of RingCentral supporting WebRTC is huge for RingCentral customers, partners, and developers. WebRTC is a free, open source project initiative supported by Google, Mozilla, and Opera (among others) that provides browsers and mobile applications with Real-Time Communications (RTC) capabilities via simple APIs.
How do I get started with RingCentral WebRTC?
The RingCentral WebRTC services are available as an invite-only beta. If you would like to request an invitation to the WebRTC Beta program, please complete this invitation form.
RingCentral WebRTC at Launch Hackathon
RingCentral sponsored Launch Hackathon from February 26-28, 2016. We had nearly thirty teams of developers who registered to use WebRTC in their hackathon projects. During this time we were able to identify some of the challenges developers may have in implementing this new technology into their applications and are actively working on improvements for our customers!
What is WebRTC?
WebRTC is a technology which supports browser-to-browser applications for voice calling, video chat, and [peer-to-peer] P2P file sharing without the need of either internal or external plugins.
Telephony is traditionally service-based, meaning companies provide a monthly subscription service which worked well for business models with physical wires (the ones on the telephone poles along roads). The advent of smartphones, changed this to an application model, but with WebRTC communication can shift to the web. With WebRTC any device with a browser can be enabled for real-time communication such as voice, video, and data sharing. WebRTC facilitates peer-to-peer communications (one device can establish communication with another device just using the browser).
Why do you need RingCentral with WebRTC?
RingCentral has a proven track-record for consistently delivering our customers with telephony communications, but more importantly, we provide our customers with high-quality and reliable telephony services which their businesses depend upon to operate. With RingCentral’s WebRTC announcement, developers will be able to implement telephony interfaces in their web applications with a simple JavaScript library built upon RingCentral’s proven enterprise-class infrastructure. Our infrastructure additionally, enables businesses using our WebRTC implementation to enable recording of your business telephony calls.
Which features of WebRTC does RingCentral support?
We wanted to release our WebRTC support by focusing on our area of expertise first and foremost — voice. RingCentral will only support voice communications with our initial release of WebRTC. Once we have established a successful track-record of our customers being able to implement WebRTC into their web applications using our WebRTC SDK we will begin working on support for video and data. This allows us to focus on delivering business-dependable web application and website voice calls to ensure our customers experience the same quality of service (QoS) they have come to expect from all of RingCentral’s currently available voice, sms, fax, instant messaging, and team collaboration tools.
Where is the RingCentral WebRTC SDK?
The RingCentral WebRTC SDK is currently available in Github and named ringcentral-web-phone. This name may change in the future, but the WebRTC SDK will always be part of RingCentral’s Github Organization and you can search for it there if the name does change in the future.
The RingCentral WebRTC SDK simplifies the signaling, registration, and exposes events important for using WebRTC in a website or web application. A WebRTC Demo is available to quickly help developers see the full range of voice controls supported by RingCentral’s WebRTC release.
Originally published Mar 03, 2016, updated Aug 11, 2020
