More from FutureNet World: telcos are hopeful 5G APIs will drive revenue by blending networks, cloud, and AI for enterprise apps, and cite on-tap demand from the finance and smart cities sectors; but big challenges remain with cross-domain integration and scale.
Connect and combine – finance industry (plus cities/buildings) is queuing up to tap into network APIs; telcos are looking to combine with domain APIs.
Standardize and scale – protagonists proclaim industry work to standardize APIs, and list the challenges to make them scale in new enterprise sectors.
Collaborate and compete – operators must balance collaboration and competition to add unique value on top of shared APIs to differentiate.
More from FutureNet World in London this week (May 7-8), where a panel comprising tier-one telcos BT and Orange, plus fiber network operator Colt Technology Services and IT software outfit Red Hat, discussed the early progress to open up new 5G SA features to developers and enterprises, and how to scale this grand money-making project so everyone loves telcos again (even telcos themselves). In other words, it was another chat about application programming interfaces (APIs), and how to maximize early opportunities with network interfaces, and when to “mash” them into sundry other horizontal and vertical developer interfaces. It was a good discussion, as follows.
The first point, made by Bastien Bianchi, director of core network and transmission solutions at Orange in Belgium and Luxembourg, is that the financial services sector is having a field day (“quite a lot of traction”) already with network APIs. Notably, digital identity and authentication providers are approaching Orange – and not the other way around. Bianchi said: “They are coming to us, and they are doing so for different reasons: because they know us already, having integrated our network capabilities for a long time, and because fraud threat and regulatory pressure are rising. And also, because they see us as a trusted source – because of our intrinsic strengths as an operator.”
This trust and familiarity, borne from common market regulation and inherent security interests, goes from “long-time” API usage for things like one-time SMS passwords (OTP SMS) through to new API collaboration around fraud prevention and identity for things like SIM swap detection and number verification. But he sees potential in location-based use cases, as well, such as for measuring population densities and traffic flows in public spaces (for smart cities and smart mobility). Again, the industry’s record with security, privacy (“anonymization”), and sovereignty give it an edge, he reckons – “not just that the information (telco) is trusted, but that it can handle the regulation”.
Besides, Bianchi referenced “this big quality and demand topic” (network quality and demand insights) as “promising”, and subject to commercial exploration (“some interaction with some customers”) –but also in need of “different IT network endeavours to make it happen”. In other words, it looks good on paper, but there is work to do, and easier opportunities in the meantime. Which is not the case in the fixed-line fiber business, where demand for network APIs is already shaped by the need for greater agility and flexibility, driven by industry changes like cloud migration and hybrid working since Covid-19 – according to Fahim Sabir, director of network-on-demand at Colt.
“We’re seeing real enterprise demand for agility – around cloud-ification of applications, and movement of individuals [and work spaces]. But not just that. Because the fiber network also underpins other use cases around quality – because [it is the backbone infrastructure for cellular, and so on]. And so the ability to control the fiber network is really important,” said Sabir, going on to explain how APIs are being used to automate service provisioning and control in minutes, including usage-based (hourly) billing and micro-contracts, instead of multi-year deals, billed monthly. “You can change the network and bill it according to its utilization.”
He explained: “We’re seeing interesting use cases, like this whole idea that an enterprise wants to start a software development project in the cloud – so the [initial] service request integrates into a number of [network and cloud] infrastructure platforms, including our own, to effectively set up the environment for the software project. Once the authorization is done, it can be completed in minutes. And once the project is over, it can be reversed and torn down. For things like cost management, it is super important to enterprises.” It is the same principle in the ‘smart buildings’ space, he said – to be able to provision services in response to occupancy, to manage resources and costs.
Ian Hood, chief technology officer for telecommunications, pointed to certain emerging API-sprung applications: quality-on-demand for in-stadium sports, to live-stream 360° video with interactive elements like QR codes for retail purchases. Beyond, the next wave will be intelligent, he said: AI-driven interactions, such as real-time voice translation, layered on top of network APIs; ultimately, APIs will increasingly connect into agentic AI workflows. “That is our next move. This is where we’re headed,” he said.
In part, because the same fiber programmability is coming to 5G in standalone (5G SA) versions – “to programme network end-to-end, through the core all the way into the IMS and radio network,” remarked Reza Rahnama, managing director for mobile networks at BT. “So you can set the functions and slices, and totally control it. That’s the vision; very different to NSA and EPC. The 5G SA core network is prime for this type of stuff,” he explained. Telcos have not been great at “building these types of use cases”, but they are “learning”, he added – mainly through the GSMA’s open-source CAMARA initiative to standardise how operators expose their network capabilities as APIs.
“Because those who want to build applications don’t want to do it just for one service provider. They want to be able to do it across the whole telco domain.” Equally, there remains, and must remain, an indelible streak of collaborative competition (or competitive collaboration). “We all want to differentiate. We all want to win. It is a competitive industry,” said Rahnama. Telcos will add their own KPIs and services on top of industry APIs; they have to stand out and innovate, he said, and will mostly do so by some kind of extra-curricular co-creation – whether with hyperscalers, gaming companies, transport providers, or other verticals to combine telcos APIs with their domain access.
Which gets into conversation about how to (and when to) combine cross-sector APIs. Hood at Red Hat sees a challenge, first: telcos need to connect and harmonize multiple API frameworks – not just CAMARA, but also NGMN (Next Generation Mobile Networks Alliance), defining operator requirements and practices to make APIs work smoother, and 5GF (5G Future Forum), creating create specs and standards for cross-operator 5G edge service innovation and interoperability. The target is for telcos to deliver a unified API experience (to “translate those ones into the same picture”), he said.
The session chair, Henry Calvert from the GSMA, pointed to a Colt API ‘mash-up’ demo at MWC, organised with the Orange network and the GSMA’s Open Gateway framework of common network APIs, which presented an “end-to-end” solution across multiple domains to show how quality on-demand might be implemented – so the system responds to a customer request for a higher-quality service by scaling up resources across the entire network, “not just at the destination but also at the source”, including the cloud infrastructure behind the service. Sabir reflected: “It showed how these domains work together, and why standards are super helpful.”
But there were warnings, here, too. Bianchi at Orange acknowledged that telcos should avoid just commoditized or “atomic” standalone APIs APIs with limited margins, and look to bundle, enrich, and innovate on top; and that AI will, invariably, play a key role to unlock the value of combined APIs. (“AI can act as the “engine” that turns raw API data into sophisticated, valuable services.) But the telecom industry still has a lot of untapped business potential just from basic “layer one” network APIs first, through initiatives like CAMARA. It should focus on capturing that opportunity before rushing to combine network APIs with cross-domain interfaces in other industries, he said.
“I’m not sure we have captured all the business around the layer-one APIs. This is a global industry initiative, which we have to carry out together – because it will come from this, with pretty basic APIs [to start], that the developer world will get to interact with us in a more dynamic way. So first, we have to focus as an industry… to capture all that potential.” Sabir put focus on technical issues, extending Hood’s comment about rationalising telco-industry API projects into distributed and containerized network architectures. To fully unlock the value of API mashups, telcos must figure out how to work across cloud providers and beyond just their own networks.
Because the future is multi-cloud and multi-domain. Sabir remarked: “I don’t think the industry has gone far enough with componentization. In order to actually mash things up, you need to have stuff at a fine-enough component granularity so the thing that controls all the pieces can control the right bits. The public cloud providers started with a highly componentized model and, as a result, have had use cases implemented on their environments that they probably didn’t think of when they first introduced them. That’s super important. The industry has to work its way to a finer level of granularity in terms of control.”
Meanwhile, Hood pointed to the growing challenge to expose network APIs and capabilities over hyperscaler platforms, especially where the connection between the two parties is somehow insufficient. “What if I want to actually expose this API and capability over the hyperscaler? Because we’re kind of living in a different realm at this point,” he said. It means telcos need to push applications and services “over the top” of the underlying network – sometimes bypassing traditional network APIs altogether – in order to deliver across public cloud and multi-domain environments on both mobile and fixed services.
He added: “So there’s that angle on this equation about how to expand this into public clouds and across domains. So these mashups have to go beyond just the telco by itself to the hyperscaler and then back to both the mobile and the fixed side of the equation.”
