Dreaming of the long-tail and Network APIs

stein@opensky

This is the time of year when every self-respecting consultancy company makes predictions for the year to come (i.e. 2026 just now at the start gate) – and, in addition, CES is just finished – so more tech news announcements can be expected soon as well. I will not try to predict much myself now – but rather than writing long articles about specific themes (which I have done too often recently), I am issuing a set of short commentaries about various topics that have triggered or still trigger me. Here is a very short commentary on Network APIs.

Just before MWC23, I had a chat with a friend of mine involved with the GSMA who said: “you won’t believe what the key initiative of the GSMA this MWC will be: Network APIs”. If I backtrack 20 years, there was a similar initiative within the GSMA that I was involved with – which failed (see my comments on MWC23 here). That time the challenge was governance and timing. This time it might succeed, at least to a certain extent, or it may fail due to larger ecosystem issues - or simply volume.

I have noticed several commentaries about Network APIs these days – most of them skeptical (like e.g. Light Reading here). From my perspective, however, it is the right thing to do – but it will not save the MNO business model. For this to happen there will need to be a much more significant revenue effect for the operators – and in my view, there will only be a 1-digit effect on revenues however successful it will be. The logic of it all is that operators can expose important network data and sell this to developers that will develop innovative services on the top of networks – and that the MNOs will get a good share of those revenues. This is a good approach, but the challenge with it is that developers don’t want to relate to many operator platforms, so they need a common and standard platform to work on – and this is why the industry has come up with CAMARA / Open Gateway, Aduna, Vonage etc – which are needed.

80 or so operators world-wide have joined the GSMA’s Open Gateway mission, including large operator groups like Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Verizon, AT&T, Airtel, Singtel, all the Chinese operators etc (maybe more to come at MWC26?) – and telco vendors like Ericsson, Nokia, AT&T, Cisco, and Huawei.

Around the same time as the mentioned earlier GSMA initiative, I was also championing a similar initiative within a large operator group with the slogan “going from spaghetti to lasagna”, i.e. creating standard northbound APIs integrated into the stacks of a large number of different Business Units – all very different and all with a lot of legacy. In addition to the governance issues around it, the technical complexity of integration was also not negligible. Without going into details about this, this report from Enea.com (“Why Open Gateway/CAMARA Isn't Plug-and-Play”) elaborates further on these challenges. Southbound integration is a big challenge – but, if it works and a sufficient number of operators join the club, it could open up a long-tail service opportunity for participating operators. A remaining challenge for such long-tail service development might of course be the ecosystem battle between big tech and “their” developer communities.

The jury is still out on network APIs – but it is worth a try. It will not save the MNO business models though. More on MNO business models to come …