News and Analysis: 2015- A Year in Review, Part One

Today, we take a look at the 2015's "big news" headlines and trends as we approach the end of another year and prepare to make predictions for 2016. 

Starting with major regulatory decisions in the U.S., the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) adopted two new major policies including "Net Neutrality" rules, plus guidelines for telcos seeking to retire their legacy wireline voice networks.  A variety of companies and trade associations are still waging court battles on net neutrality, but it seems as if the FCC has had its way on the issues so far.  

The FCC's telco transition rules were pretty much common sense, with rules like giving advance notice and assuring that service performance isn't degraded with the transition; however, the fact that the FCC felt compelled to issue rules suggests it will play an active role in how the traditional PSTN is retired.  

The FCC also granted temporary waivers to AT&T and Verizon.  The waivers allow the companies to offer Voice over Wi-Fi (VoWi-Fi) and other services without violating E-911 rules or other mandated services established for people with disabilities such as teletypewriter (TTY) device support. What it didn't do is establish a permanent solution that addresses a host of other regulatory requirements; rather it allowed that there will be more rules to come in the future.    

The list of applications supported by Real Time Communications protocols gained momentum, with the majority of these enabled by using WebRTC. Service providers like Masergy extended WebRTC support for cloud-based services such as contact center and video collaboration.  Business support systems providers such as SAP also began to integrate WebRTC into their portfolio, often using an "as a service" platform like Kandy to supply the WebRTC infrastructure.  Infrastructure suppliers such as Digium released SDKs to further WebRTC developers' support and extend its availability.  A full report on WebRTC's momentum can be found here in the Webtorials 2015 WebRTC State of the Market report.   

Microsoft unveiled new APIs designed to offer voice and video calls over Skype for Web and Skype for Outlook.com using the Microsoft Edge browser without the need to install any plugins, a common communications approach used also used by WebRTC.  Microsoft went on to explain how its ORTC API approach can support Skype for Business and how it can provide feature support within the browser Microsoft uses an OTRC-based solution to interoperate with WebRTC communications services supported by other browsers such as Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.   

Next time, we'll cover the 2015 shifts within the wireline and wireless carrier infrastructures, including the service providers' progress with VoLTE and their steps to retire the legacy PSTN.