In the near future, residents and business owners in Apple Valley, Victorville and elsewhere in the High Desert will be making VoIP calls almost exclusively without even realizing it.
Just like landlines have been disappearing due to boom in mobile communications, wireless voice calls are expected to be replaced by VoIP transmissions. This does not mean that smartphones will become outdated; in fact, they will become even more ubiquitous, but they will mostly be used to connect to wireless broadband for the purpose of making VoIP calls.
Most people do not realize that the Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology dates back to the 1970s. Back then, it was solely in the purview of the United States government. The formalization of the protocol as a standard came about in 1995. A year later, Microsoft introduced NetMeeting, which in just a few years would go from computer-to-computer communications to computer-to-landline voice calls. By the time Skype came on the scene in 2003, computer-to-computer communications had already matured.
In the case of WebRTC, the major player is Google, and the intent is to target applications such as Skype. With WebRTC, users would not require a smartphone at all, simply a modern Web browser that can facilitate audio and video conferencing. This would be an interesting proposition for business owners in California who would only need to ensure that their websites are WebRTC compatible so that customers can easily contact them.