Enabling Emergency Calls for RingCentral WebRTC Apps

Dibyendu Roy
RingCentral Developers
4 min readMay 15, 2019

The last few years have seen a proliferation in the number of browser apps that have been created to facilitate real-time communications. These apps use a technology called WebRTC that empower users to make and receive calls directly from the browser. WebRTC was initiated by Google as an open source framework and has seen large scale adoption. WebRTC is now supported by all major web browsers.

Details about WebRTC technology can be found here. We at RingCentral strive to be at the cutting edge of communication technology and have long been supporting WebRTC through our popular JavaScript WebRTC library.

We have thousands of developers and customers, who have successfully leveraged the RingCentral platform to build web applications using our WebRTC library that can make and receive calls supporting their key business processes. We at RingCentral are taking a step further and introducing the ability to make emergency calls using the same apps without writing any extra code. This new feature will be integrated into the RingCentral OAuth flow.

With this new feature, all the RingCentral apps built on the RingCentral platform and having “VoipCalling” permission would be able to make emergency calls in case such a situation arises. These emergency calls would use the emergency address that is registered at RingCentral. If no emergency address is registered the user would be asked to enter the emergency address associated with the Digital Line (DL). Some of the key items of this feature that users and developers should be aware of are:

  1. To enable E911 calling (which is also a legal requirement by FCC) the user would need to have a paid RingCentral Digital Line (DL) and be from US or Canada region. Regions outside of the US and CA will not have this feature.
  2. This would be activated by default on Apps that have a “VoipCalling” calling app permission
  3. The flow to Add or Confirm an Emergency address will happen during the OAuth process of the App and no coding is needed by the App developers.
  4. Once an Emergency Address is set, it will only ask to confirm or Update the address again only when the user is logged out and logs back in.
  5. If the Emergency Address is already set, the user just needs to confirm the address within the login flow.
  6. If the user has multiple Digital Lines, the flow will provide an option to select a specific digital line of interest and set the emergency address for the specific DL.
  7. The Emergency address saved through this flow is the same emergency address that is set in the RingCentral service portal.
  8. If the user does not have a paid DL he cannot make any PSTN or Emergency calls.

9. This feature will be by default enabled for all Apps that have a VOIP calling permission.

The release date for this feature is 17th June 2019.

Below are some of the screenshots of the new OAuth flow:

Login Flow Step 1— No Changes
Login Flow Step 2— No Changes
Login Flow Step 3 — No Change
Login Flow Step 4 — New Screen Introduced
Single DL — Emergency Address Already Set
In case the user does not have a paid DL

App developers — Please feel free to inform your end users of this new feature and make any necessary communication plan as needed. Please post questions on the Dev community for any additional questions that you might have.

Ring Central Developer Support : https://developers.ringcentral.com/support.html

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Dibyendu Roy
RingCentral Developers

Sr Product Manager RingCentral, passionate about technology and building products that can bring a step function change, improving peoples lives significantly