WebRTC is great, but this study is so chilling

[DevelopDaily]

This article states 30% of WebRTC P2P traffic has to use TURN servers. That is very chilling because it significantly diminishes one of the major design goals of the WebRTC, i.e., peer to peer. Connecting via a relay isn't really qualified as P2P, is it?

Running a national public TURN network must be very expensive, but can be profitable and disruptive because the WebRTC could threaten the traditional telephone network. I am surprised the major venture capital firms have not yet come to this marketplace since the debut of the WebRTC many years ago. At least 3 possible business models, which I can think of, could make the large-scale TURN operation profitable.

Right now, I cannot identify a single dominant WebRTC infrastructure operator on webrtcindex.com. Those listed on the site are quite small, aren't they?

Do you know more about any really big TURN operators, free or not?

Any comments are appreciated.

[Tsahi Levent-Levi]

Let me try to put a few things in order here:

1. WebRTC does its best not to use relays via TURN, at least when it is configured properly
2. Different use cases will have different percentage of their traffic go through TURN servers - it depends a lot of where your customers are and how do they connect to the network. Most large vendors I've spoken to report 20% TURN relay traffic. Some reported over 30% (I've seen bugs forcing TURN on all traffic as well)
3. Running a national or international public TURN network isn't that expensive - the costs depends on what gets sent and the size of your service. It can get expensive when you're big, but then again - you're big so handle that
4. There are two parts to running the TURN service:
1. Paying for the actual machines (usually hosted on a third party cloud like AWS, Google cloud or others
2. Doing the devops around it
5. Twilio offers a NAT traversal service (=TURN servers). They are quite big as a company...
6. There's also XirSys offering this service to happy customers
7. And many prefer to just roll their own
8. There are no real free TURN services, and if they were, I'd stay away from them (here's why: https://bloggeek.me/google-free-turn-server/)

Regards,

Tsahi

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Regards,

Tsahi Levent-Levi

Analyst & Consultant

BlogGeek.me

H.264 or VP8? Enroll to my free video course about Picking a WebRTC Video Codec: http://bit.ly/2fMUd2T

[Alessandro Polidori]

Hi, very clear explanation.

Do you know some great open source project for stun & turn servers ?

[Tsahi Levent-Levi]

coturn: https://github.com/coturn/coturn

restund: http://www.creytiv.com/restund.html

and there's a new and promising pion-TURN one: https://github.com/pions/turn

You can also use XirSys, Twilio NAT traversal or a few other managed TURN servers under a pay as you go subscription plan as far as I know.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/discuss-webrtc/11bd1149-3e7a-414c-8b23-ac5ed7923020%40googlegroups.com.

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[Alessandro Polidori]

Great, many thanks for your hints ! :)