Re:Firefox Hello
by mccr8 on Wednesday January 28, 2015 @06:40PM
(#8963306)
The underlying technology used to implement this is WebRTC, which is available to web pages. Implementing peer-to-peer real time video communication entirely in Javascript would be difficult, so it has to be provided to some extent by the browser itself.
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Re:Firefox Hello
by nothrabannosir on Wednesday January 28, 2015 @06:49PM
(#8963361)
But, if this is peer-to-peer, what's Telefonica's role?
Re:Firefox Hello
by jamespitts on Wednesday January 28, 2015 @07:31PM
(#8963581)
It is Telefonica's OpenTok division that provides the webrtc service and javascript API upon which Firefox Hello runs.
http://www.tokbox.com/blog/firefox-hello-mozilla-enhances-op...
But taking it a bit deeper, this is all part of Telefonica's strategic partnership with Mozilla to market phones running Firefox OS.
I don't know about Telefonica's role, but in general WebRTC needs external servers to deal with things like NATs and firewalls: http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/webrtc/infrastructure...
I think telefonica is running the looper service that helps the peers connect to each other... but I am not sure.
You can't have complete peer-to-peer with browsers unless you properly implement multicast groups or something of that sort. So peer-to-peer needs help bootstrapping by providing some registration service (a meet-in-the middle if you wish).
That is what Telefonica might be doing -- providing a default registration service.
Also because of funky routers and NAT rules, even after the initial session is set up data/audio might not be going through, so then you need STUN or TURN servers so Telefonica might be providing those as well.
I'm a bit out of the loop, but to build on mccr8 and soapdog's answer:
Anyone doing WebRTC seriously will need to run a fallback centralized pairing service to get around the wacky real world network topology and setup a successful p2p connection. In some cases, you need a dumb centralized pipe to connect the peers.