The Home Advantage of Self-Service WebRTC Support

Euan O’Donovan at Spearline explains the home advantage of self-service WebRTC support for your connectivity and quality issues.

Home Comforts

As the age-old adage goes, you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression. Never was this maxim more relevant than in the area of real-time communications.

The name says it all; real-time. Everything is about now, not later. Communications must flow easily, unencumbered by issues like lag or jitter, or packet loss.

There is little more damaging to your customer/user relationships than the tiresome back and forth of problem firefighting. A seemingly ceaseless loop of emails, IT support tickets, and service calls can lead to a downward spiral for reputation and growth.

Complicating matters is our new remote-working reality. Where once we might have interacted with a user’s IT department, we are now more likely to have to support the user directly.

And different users use different home networks and different devices; the good old days of infrastructural standardization are long gone.

The result of this foundational disparity is that users are unlikely to have the technical skills needed to work with you to resolve their issues. Our users’ home comforts have become our home headaches.

But don’t despair just yet. Spearline have developed a little something for webRTC network testing and support to help you stay in your users’ good graces. Let’s talk about qualityRTC.

Support Where It’s Needed

qualityRTC is the self-service panacea for all webRTC application ills. With one simple click, your users can access our webRTC network testing and webRTC support tools to diagnose their own issues, referencing data from qualityRTCs myriad configurable tests.

Each test is geared towards gaining an understanding of one or more aspects of your user’s network. Let’s take a look at just some of the issues qualityRTC will weed out.

Bad Routing

One of the main offenders undermining the quality of webRTC connectivity is bad routing. Bad routing refers to the distance between the user and your backend infrastructure.

Sometimes, despite the relative proximity of servers, connectivity is adversely affected by simple factors like your users employing an incompatible VPN or bad routing rules that connect them to the wrong server. qualityRTC will reveal all.

Bad DNS

One of the many silent tests you can avail of through qualityRTC is the DNS resolution test. This simple but important test will determine if your resolution mechanism is compatible with your user’s DNS.

If your test returns a Bad DNS resolution message, it means that your automatic geolocation resolution has chosen a less than optimal data centre. So, for example, if someone in Europe was to be assigned a US-based data centre, latency issues could cause a reduction in their media quality. Not ideal!

qualityRTC will make bad DNS issues apparent and enable you to take appropriate and speedy remedial action, whether that be to reconfigure DNS providers, or to set the geographical location explicitly in front of your communication application, thereby overriding automatic geolocation.

Firewall Issues

It is not uncommon for a disparity to exist between the bitrates of video bandwidth and bandwidth speed. qualityRTC might, for example, return results that show low video bandwidth bitrates, while the bandwidth speeds show high bitrates. This is another useful diagnostic as it points to possible UDP traffic throttling by the users firewall.

Armed with the test results, you can determine if UDP traffic is throttled directly for that user, or if their firewall is blocking P2P encrypted or bittorrent traffic, which will indirectly throttle their webRTC traffic.

Full-Time Whistle

Whatever the issue, qualityRTC’s comprehensive suite of webRTC network testing and support tools will reveal it and you can work with your users to quickly rectify the matter.

You don’t need to install anything, qualityRTC can run from virtually any modern web browser, on desktop and on mobile.

You don’t have to ask your users to do anything other than run a simple webRTC network test designed to work with your infrastructure, the results of which are automatically collected and analyzed in an easy, accessible format for your support team to use.

As part of our onboarding process, we work with you to determine whether to employ webRTC tests for voice or video scenarios and set these up for you in advance.

We design a landing page specific to you and your needs, and carry out any backend integrations for you. You are up and running with meaningful test data in no time.

qualityRTC is a no-brainer, reducing the average handling time for webRTC connectivity and quality issues from days or hours to minutes, all while dramatically reducing the load on your support team and increasing their efficiency. See for yourself.