The fourth issue of our popular reference guide for world wide WebRTC performance metrics is available as a free download. Our Monthly Newsletter subscribers already got the report to their inboxes with yesterday’s newsletter.

As WebRTC matures, we begin to see exciting developments in the field. To wider circulate these findings, we began to publish a regular WebRTC Metrics Report series that presents key data and insights on the sessions monitored by callstats.io.

In 2017, WebRTC moved to the candidate release state and several browsers announced support for WebRTC v1.0, including Apple’s Safari and Microsoft’s Edge. With WebRTC gaining maturity, we observe the application ecosystem growing bigger and more interesting with exciting use cases in e.g. IoT, VR/AR, automation, and conversational de- vices.

This report is the fourth issue we have published in the last 12 months. We have received an overwhelming positive response to our report series and in 2018 we are going to publish repost every four months. Unlike our earlier reports, which primarily reported on WebRTC’s multimedia pipeline, i.e., the performance of audio and video, this special issue is mostly targeted on data channels, i.e., RTCDataChannels. In the summer of 2017, we started running pre-call tests, i.e., each endpoint would run a series of network tests before the call was initiated. These tests are run over our TURN infrastructure, and depending on the type of tests, they may hit the nearest geographical TURN server or explicitly other TURN server.

In the last quarter, our install-base has continued to grow 20% month on month, we have over 600 integrated products, and our world-wide monitored traffic grew by 3-times. Since 2018 is around the corner, we are making advancements on multiple fronts: improvements for the dashboard are underway and AI/ML has made its way into more products, for example, in finding correlations in our data across customers, end-users, and networks.

Highlights from the report

• Chrome still dominates the WebRTC browser market. Likewise, the operating system distributions remain the same, with Windows leading.
• 20% of the pre-call tests have a throughput of 5000 kbps or more.
• 80% of the pre-call tests have an average throughput above 500 kbps.
• 50% of the pre-call tests do not report any losses.
• In the last 3 months, Firefox and Chrome data channel performance has improved.
• 90% of connections have an RTT of below 100ms which is good for real time communication.
• 10% of the monitored conference calls have a throughput of higher than 1000 kbps compared to 60% for the pre-call test.
• 20% of the cases the media session has a higher throughput than the pre-call test.
• Pre-call test estimates a lower RTT in the case of TURN than the peer-to-peer.
• 65% of the cases pre-call test for TURN reported lower RTT to the third-party TURN server used by the conference.

WebRTC insights for better communication

We hope it helps product managers and engineers build better real-time communication systems. This report answers to questions related to data channels:

• Do data channels work the same way on every browser?
• Do the pre-call test network metrics correlate well with the conference that follows?

We hope you enjoy reading this report as much as we enjoyed writing it.

Suomi100

P.S. Today Finland celebrates its 100th year as an independent country. You can follow the festivities on various platforms by searching for Suomi100.

Access our previous reports

WebRTC Metrics Report 2017/02 (PDF)

WebRTC Metrics Report 2017/01 (PDF)

WebRTC Metrics Report 2016/01 (PDF)