Use of Open APIs Continues Growing but More Slowly Than Some Predicted

“There’s a lot of optimism, probably a bit of overoptimism” about APIs. They're "one piece of a much bigger puzzle that the industry needs to execute if we want to have significant incremental growth,” Lenahan said. "APIs alone are not sufficient. New security services alone are not sufficient.” He added, “There are big efficiencies” to be had for the growing number of sensors attached to networks and for tracking goods being shipped using wireless networks.

Henry Calvert, head of networks at GSMA, said his group has seen a significant increase over the last year in Camara-based APIs, an open source project from the Linux Foundation. These are predominantly used in anti-fraud efforts and for carrier billing, he said. Forecasts that open APIs will mean more than $100 billion in revenue for operators by 2030 are likely premature by "one or two years,” he said. “We need more carriers to launch” API capabilities “and actually drive forward.”

The use of APIs for anti-fraud and authentication is a growing market, Calvert said. He said he sees potential use by carriers for understanding the performance that the end user is actually seeing from the network, whether that’s latency or signal strength, and for improving network performance. The auto industry is interested in improving connections to better understand how vehicles perform on the road, Calvert said. In e-commerce, sellers need the highest quality connection during the last 15 seconds of a transaction, when the authorization is going through, he said.

APIs “are part of the puzzle, but not really the answer to bringing in new revenue,” said Mark Gilmour, chief technology officer at ConnectiviTree, which provides data transport. Gilmour said there's sometimes too much industry focus on how to charge more for better connections. “We need to remember that there is a long history of all industries wanting to pay less."

Speakers agreed there will be few “easy wins” for carriers in launching open APIs. “It has taken a long time to actually develop the technologies behind this,” and many companies still don’t understand what capabilities are already available, Calvert said. “The journey is not over at all.” Customers must “drive the demand” for APIs, he said.

Network Changes

Colin Bannon, CTO of BT Business, said during a second panel that the question becomes how deeply providers expose their networks. “It is incredibly challenging for telcos to digitalize and platformize what were essentially very stove-piped, different … areas to get to this new future world.”

For decades, carrier networks saw little fundamental change, Bannon said. In recent years, BT decided it had to open its network to make it “fully programmable and digital from the very bottom level.” BT “took multiple cores in our network and eliminated them and converged them,” he said. “We’ve developed the concept of software-defined everything."

Carriers need “full programmability deep into the network,” Bannon said. Telcos also need “zero-touch, full automation,” he said. “Full-stack observability becomes really important as well and also abstraction of how you control the network,” he said. Transforming a legacy network is difficult, “but it is vitally important to stay relevant for your customers in the future.”

The core business for carriers will remain “providing high-availability, very reliable services and connectivity,” said Warren Bayek, vice president in the technology office at software company Wind River. That won’t change, he said, but telcos also have to refocus on offering a digital platform for their customers and “platform-as-a-service” offerings.

Carriers are “the enablers of many, many digital platforms,” said Fahim Sabir, director-digital solutions at Colt Technology. “The cloud doesn’t work without us … nothing really works without us,” he said. Carriers “have a set of assets and there’s a lot of power that can be unlocked from those assets."