Can you believe it's already the middle of July? With more than six months of 2023 already behind us, it's time to get a mid-year update on what’s happening in the world of 5G Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).
To kick things off, there has been some progress in the GSMA’s 5G API project. Most notably major Chinese carriers joined in on the initiative late last month.
Additionally, Chinese operators, including China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom, have now joined the GSMA’s Open Gateway 5G initiative, announced at the Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona this year. The group currently numbers 29 mobile network operators (MNOs), up from the 21 operators that signed on at launch. The Chinese operators, which are some of the largest in the world, should encourage more developer take-up of the program.
At the moment, the group has only issued eight standardized APIs under the Linux Foundation's CAMARA open source project. These cover SIM Swap, Quality on Demand, Device Status (Connected or Roaming Status), Number Verification, Edge Site Selection and Routing, Number Verification (SMS 2FA), Carrier Billing – Check Out and Device Location (Verify Location). The GSMA has said that more releases are planned during the remainder of 2023.
Two sides of the system
“Maybe a better term for this stuff is network exposure-as-a-service (NEaaS),” Leonard Lee, executive analyst at neXt Curve, told Silverlinings. “It's kind of a hybrid [infrastructure-as-a-service/platform-as-a-service] concept of offering composable network capabilities and features as services to business application developers.”
“I see two approaches in the incubation of the ‘5G API ecosystem’ that have been in play for quite some time: top-down (developer to the operator) and bottom-up (operator up to the developers),” Lee added.
Lee pointed to Ericsson as a "great example" of the top-down approach, stating that the company has managed to connect partner operators with developers via its Global Network Platform. That platform, he continued, is an extension of Vonage's communications platform-as-a-service (CPaaS) framework.
"In a way, GNP is brokering a NEaaS market for operators with the potential to have global scope for novel and reasonably ubiquitous network capabilities as they become feasible on enough 5G networks around the globe," he explained.
Other telco vendors such as Amdocs (NASDAQ: DOX), Netcracker, and companies such as Cognizant (NASDAQ: CTSH), IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Tech Mahindra (NSE: TECHM) have taken “a bottom-up approach of enabling operators to create their own NEaaS markets,” Lee said. “They provide tools and platforms for network exposure, service monetization that are typically integrated into their OSS/BSS and network management suite of software.”
Ultimately, Lee said he thinks the "whole API thing" is less about the APIs themselves and more about giving developers access to the novel network features and capabilities in a 5G network and giving operators a way to monetize these new services.
"APIs are just interfaces that developers use to access a network service/slice, capability, or capacity. Without the underlying network infrastructure capability, the API is just an API," he concluded.