ICE (Interactive Connectivity Establishment) is the negotiation framework WebRTC uses to find a working network path between two devices. It gathers every candidate route it can — the device's local (host) address, the public address discovered via STUN, and a relayed path via a TURN server — then probes those candidates pairwise and selects the best route that actually works. This is why WebRTC calls connect across home routers, hospital firewalls, and mobile carrier networks without anyone manually configuring ports or addresses, and it is also the mechanism behind reconnection when a network changes mid-call.
For a telemedicine product, ICE behavior sits directly underneath your most painful support category: "the call never connected" or "the call dropped and wouldn't come back." Because ICE is what tries, fails, and retries connection paths, slow or failing ICE negotiation is one of the top root causes of those tickets, and it is invisible unless you instrument it.
The concrete engineering implication is to surface ICE diagnostics into your observability: which candidate types were gathered, which candidate pair was finally selected (a TURN-relayed pair, for instance, tells you the patient is on a restrictive network), and how long negotiation took. Patterns in that data tell you whether you need more TURN capacity, whether a particular hospital network is hostile, or whether reconnection logic is firing correctly. The common pitfall is shipping with no visibility into ICE at all, leaving the team to guess at connection failures from user complaints rather than data.
