Network APIs move telecom beyond connectivity by giving enterprises trusted signals for authentication, fraud prevention and AI-driven customer interaction
The telecom industry’s network API conversation has matured quickly. The early work was about exposure — how to make network capabilities available through standardized, developer-friendly interfaces. The harder work is now about adoption — how to turn those capabilities into enterprise outcomes.
That is where Deutsche Telekom’s Chathurangi Wickramasinghe, SVP Magenta Business API, starts the discussion. She framed network APIs as a way to deliver measurable business value. “Building APIs is right now not the challenge,” she said. “But scaling adoption is a challenge.”
Deutsche Telekom has been active in the standardization and commercialization work around CAMARA, GSMA Open Gateway and TM Forum. The company launched MagentaBusiness API in Germany in 2023, with Vonage providing the platform, and positioned it as a one-stop shop for communications and network APIs. Initial APIs included Quality-on-Demand, Device Status-Roaming and Device Location. CAMARA, operating as a Linux Foundation project, is focused on defining and testing APIs that abstract telecom complexity into developer-consumable service APIs across networks and countries.
But Wickramasinghe’s point is that enterprises do not buy standardization. They buy less fraud, better authentication, trusted customer engagement and lower integration friction. “No customer wakes up in the morning and asks for APIs,” she said. “They have real business challenges they want to solve.”
In practical terms, she pointed to the relationship between RCS and network APIs. RCS can support branded, trusted and interactive communications, including appointment confirmations, service updates and two-way customer interactions. Network APIs then strengthen that engagement with capabilities like Number Verify and SIM Swap, which support real-time identity verification and fraud prevention.
Deutsche Telekom commercially launched Number Verify in Germany in 2024 with Vodafone and O2 Telefónica under the GSMA Open Gateway initiative. The API allows an app to verify a user’s mobile phone number without relying on SMS-based two-factor authentication, improving the user experience while reducing fraud risk. Deutsche Telekom also described SIM Swap as a way for financial institutions to check whether a phone number has recently changed SIM cards before approving a transaction.
This is where the AI connection becomes more interesting. At MWC 2026, Deutsche Telekom positioned APIs as enterprise-ready infrastructure for AI-driven use cases, emphasizing trusted network signals, real-time data and quality-of-delivery capabilities as AI moves from pilots into production.
Wickramasinghe made the same argument in simpler terms. Enterprises are adopting AI, but the main challenges are “trust, security and governance.” Network APIs can provide trusted inputs around authentication, real-time identification and fraud prevention. Those signals become more important as AI systems begin acting autonomously inside enterprise workflows.
“They rely on trusted signals,” she said. “They need [them] to carry out their tasks autonomously.” That is also the monetization thesis. Network APIs give operators a path to expose capabilities beyond connectivity. But the revenue opportunity depends on making those capabilities easy to integrate, standardized enough to scale and relevant to business problems enterprises already have.
The industry is moving in that direction. Nokia, for example, announced at MWC 2026 that Deutsche Telekom was among the operators in its Network as Code ecosystem, and specifically cited a Deutsche Telekom integration enabling Blocksport to use Number Verification for seamless mobile-based authentication in sports-related SuperApps. Nokia also linked network APIs with agentic AI, describing a collaboration with Google Cloud to make networks consumable and programmable by enterprise agents.
For operators, this reframes APIs as more than an interface. They are a control point for trust. They let enterprises ask the network questions that only the network can answer: Is this user legitimate? Has this SIM changed? Is this device where it claims to be? Can this interaction be trusted?
The agentic network, in this context, is not only about automating telecom operations. It is about making the network legible to enterprise AI systems. As AI takes on more decisions, workflows and customer interactions, the value of telecom may increasingly come from providing verified signals into those processes. Wickramasinghe’s argument was that network APIs become mainstream when operators stop selling APIs and start selling trusted outcomes.
