I don't know about Telefonica's role, but in general WebRTC needs external servers to deal with things like NATs and firewalls: http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/webrtc/infrastructure...

It is Telefonica's OpenTok division that provides the webrtc service and javascript API upon which Firefox Hello runs.

http://www.tokbox.com/blog/firefox-hello-mozilla-enhances-op...

But taking it a bit deeper, this is all part of Telefonica's strategic partnership with Mozilla to market phones running Firefox OS.

http://blog.digital.telefonica.com/tag/html5/

You can't have complete peer-to-peer with browsers unless you properly implement multicast groups or something of that sort. So peer-to-peer needs help bootstrapping by providing some registration service (a meet-in-the middle if you wish).

That is what Telefonica might be doing -- providing a default registration service.

Also because of funky routers and NAT rules, even after the initial session is set up data/audio might not be going through, so then you need STUN or TURN servers so Telefonica might be providing those as well.

I'm a bit out of the loop, but to build on mccr8 and soapdog's answer:

Anyone doing WebRTC seriously will need to run a fallback centralized pairing service to get around the wacky real world network topology and setup a successful p2p connection. In some cases, you need a dumb centralized pipe to connect the peers.