WhatsApp has over two billion active users, but for developers building real-time communications applications, it’s long been a walled garden. That’s changing. WhatsApp Business Calling is opening new doors for SIP-based integrations, and the technical landscape around it is evolving fast.
In this episode, Dan Jenkins joins us to break down what combining WhatsApp Business Calling with WebRTC and SIP actually looks like in practice: the use cases, the architecture decisions, and the technical challenges that come with it.
Dan Jenkins is founder and CEO of NimbleApe, Everycast Labs, and the organizer of the CommCon conference series. As always, Dan will bring his expertise in low latency media, video streaming and broadcast technologies to our conversation.
The episode also features Arin Sime and Tsahi Level-Levi’s Monthly WebRTC Industry Chat. This month, they discussed: OpenAI’s Secret WebRTC Architecture: No SFU? No Problem! (based on OpenAI’s recent blog post: How OpenAI delivers low-latency voice AI at scale)
WebRTC Live #113: WhatsApp Business Calling and SIP
Episode highlights and key insights below.
Links mentioned in the episode:
- CommCon is back in 2026! And heading to mainland Europe for the very first time. They’re joining forces Sipgate to bring you a three-day event in Düsseldorf from 9–11 June 2026. Get your ticket today!
- Dan’s post on the NimbleApe blog: WhatsApp Business Calling with SIP
- Dan’s talk at OpenSIPS: Connecting WhatsApp’s 2 Billion Users to Your SIP Stack – The Practical Guide (plus, his presentation slides)
- WebRTC.ventures post: How to Integrate the WhatsApp Business Calling API with WebRTC to Enable Customer Voice Calls
- Simon De Haan’s talk from RTC.on: WhatsApp calling, WebRTC & how it drives social impact programmes in south countries
Key Insights
⚡ WhatsApp is quickly becoming the future of business communications. One of the biggest shifts happening right now is simple: the best communication platform is no longer the one with the most features – it’s the one customers already use and trust. That’s why WhatsApp is becoming so powerful for real-time communication, customer support, and AI-driven experiences at global scale. Dan puts it simply, “What if you could use an app that over 2 billion people, other people use, and I could use that app to go and connect, I want to talk to Everycast Labs. And, oh, look, there’s a phone icon. Well, I’m just going to call them. And it just worked.”
⚡The hardest part isn’t technology, it’s setup. While making a SIP call or enabling voice is technically straightforward, the real challenge lies in everything surrounding it: fragmented dashboards, overlapping Meta/Facebook/WhatsApp systems, business verification rules, and unpredictable approval processes. Dan says, “Ironically, the hard bit is not actually placing a SIP call or a call in general. […] It’s business verification.”
⚡ WhatsApp for businesses is cheaper, simpler, and easier to control. With WhatsApp and open-source tools, businesses don’t just save on costs (like free inbound calls) – they also see exactly how their system works and what they’re paying for, instead of relying on a hidden third-party layer. Dan says, “Cost is the biggest one for me and being able to actually see the underlying cost. So I can’t remember off the top of my head what messaging number is stuck in my brain because I do an awful lot of WhatsApp messaging. And so sending a WhatsApp message of type utility starts at 0.17p or something like that which is half the cost of an sms for example.”
Episode Highlights
WhatsApp is becoming a new “phone system” for businesses
Instead of calling traditional phone numbers, customers can now call businesses directly inside WhatsApp – the app they already use daily. Dan explains,
“Ultimately, there’s over two billion people using WhatsApp today. I am one of them. Whether or not I really want to be using WhatsApp or not is another question. But that’s where my contacts are. That’s where my family are. So wouldn’t it be really cool if we didn’t have to use the PSTN anymore and we could just have high quality audio calls using an app on my phone? Well, we could do this for the past 10 years. WebRTC is 10 years old, right? More than 10 years old now. So we’ve been able to do this for more than 10 years, but people don’t want to download an app to make a high quality phone call to a business. And we don’t want to download an app specific for that business and all of that, right?”
Trust is the biggest advantage of WhatsApp Business Calling
It’s not about flashy features, but actually about distribution. Businesses don’t need customers to install something new, because 2 billion people already have WhatsApp on their phone. Dan says, “The best calling UX is the app that people already really have. There’s no app to install because you’ve already got it. You already trust WhatsApp because you’re already having end-to-end encrypted conversations. You trust that whatsapp when they onboard a business they are already going through the process of checking that that business exists and along with that you can then go and set a display name for your business a logo.”
WhatsApp is more controlled than SMS or RCS (less spam)
Unlike SMS or newer messaging systems, WhatsApp has strict rules like businesses can’t randomly call or message users; users must give permission. This reduces spam and increases trust.
Dan explains, “As a user, I want to call Everycast Labs, right? And so I pick up my phone, open up the WhatsApp app, and I press the call button. Well, that inherently gives us, so the call happens and the fact that they’ve called us means that we get what is called an active service window, I think is the technical term for it. And so we can call that customer back within 24 hours, I think. There’s extra permissions you can attach to the phone number that, when a caller calls you, that automatically enables call permissions and things like that. So caller calls us, we suddenly get some permissions, which means we can call them. But we can’t just call, like if they didn’t call us, we can’t just call them. And that’s why spam, et cetera, just doesn’t exist on WhatsApp, which is great.”
