What's behind the operators' push for network APIs?

 

As I saw the latest announcements from GSMA, Telefonica and Deutsche Telekom, as well as the asset impairment from Ericsson on Vonage's acquisition, I was reminded of the call I was making three years ago for the creation of operators platforms.

One one hand, 21 large operators (namely, America Movil, AT&T, Axiata, Bharti Airtel, China Mobile, Deutsche Telekom, e& Group, KDDI, KT, Liberty Global, MTN, Orange, Singtel, Swisscom, STC, Telefónica, Telenor, Telstra, Telecom Italia (TIM), Verizon and Vodafone) within the GSMA launch an initiative to open their networks to developers with the launch of 8 "universal" APIs (SIM Swap, Quality on Demand, Device Status, Number Verification, Simple Edge Discovery, One Time Password SMS, Carrier Billing – Check Out and Device Location). 

Additionally, Deutsche Telekom was first to pull the trigger on the launch of their own gateway "MagentaBusiness API" based on Ericsson's depreciated asset. The 3 APIs launched are Quality-on-demand, Device Status – Roaming and Device Location, with more to come.

Telefonica, on their side launched shortly after DT their own Open Gateway offering with 9 APIs (Carrier Billing, Know your customer, Number verification, SIM Swap, QOD, Device status, Device location, QOD wifi and blockchain public address).

On the other hand, Ericsson wrote off 50% of the Vonage acquisition, while "creating a new market for exposing 5G capabilities through network APIs".

Dissonance much? why are operators launching network APIs in fanfare and one of the earliest, largest vendor in the field reporting asset depreciation while claiming a large market opportunity?

The move for telcos to exposing network APIs is not new and has had a few unsuccessful aborted tries (GSMA OneAPI in 2013, DT's MobiledgeX launch in 2019). The premises have varied over time, but the central tenet remains the same. Although operators have great experience in rolling out and operating networks, they essentially have been providing the same connectivity services to all consumers, enterprises and governmental organization without much variation. The growth in cloud networks is underpinned by new generations of digital services, ranging from social media, video streaming for consumers and cloud storage, computing, CPaaS and IT functions cloud migration for enterprises. Telcos have been mostly observers in this transition, with some timid tries to participate, but by and large, they have been quite unsuccessful in creating and rolling out innovative digital services. As Edge computing and Open RAN RIC become possibly the first applications forcing telcos to look at possible hyperscaler tie-ins with cloud providers, it raises several strategic questions.

Telcos have been using cloud fabric and porting their vertical, proprietary systems to cloud native environment for their own benefit. As this transition progresses, there is a realization that private networks growth are a reflection of enterprises' desire to create and manage their connectivity products themselves. While operators have been architecting and planning their networks for network slicing, hoping to sell managed connectivity services to enterprises, the latter have been effectively managing their connectivity, in the cloud and in private networks themselves without the telcos' assistance. This realization leads to an important decision: If enterprises want to manage their connectivity themselves and expand that control to 5G / Cellular, should Telcos let them and if yes, by what means?

The answer is in network APIs. Without giving third party access to the network itself, the best solution is to offer a set of controlled, limited, tools that allow to discover, reserve and consume network resources while the operator retains the overall control of the network itself. There are a few conditions for this to work. 

The first, is essentially the necessity for universal access. Enterprises and developers have gone though the learning curve of using AWS, Google cloud and Azure tools, APIs and semantic. They can conceivably see value in learning a new set with these Telco APIs, but wont likely go through the effort if each Telco has a different set in different country.

The second, and historically the hardest for telcos is to create and manage an ecosystem and developer community. They have tried many times and in different settings, but in many cases have failed, only enlisting friendly developers, in the form of their suppliers and would be suppliers, dedicating efforts to further their commercial opportunities. The jury is still out as to whether this latest foray will be successful in attracting independent developers.

The third, and possibly the most risky part in this equation, is which APIs would prove useful and whether the actual premise that enterprises and developers will want to use them is untested. Operators are betting that they can essentially create a telco cloud experience for developers more than 15 years after AWS launched, with less tools, less capacity to innovate, less cloud native skills and a pretty bad record in nurturing developers and enterprises.

Ericsson's impairment of Vonage probably acknowledges that the central premise that Telco APIs are desirable is unproven, that if it succeeds, operators will want to retain control and that there is less value in the platform than in the APIs themselves (the GSMA launch on an open source platform essentially directly depreciates the Vonage acquisition).

Another path exist, which provides less control (and commercial upside) for Telcos, where they would  host third party cloud functions in their networks, even allowing third party cloud infrastructure (such as Amazon Outpost for instance) to be collocated in their data centers. This option comes with the benefit of an existing ecosystem, toolset, services and clients, just extending the cloud to the telco network. The major drawback is that the telco accepts their role as utility provider of connectivity with little participation in the service value creation.

Both scenarios are being played out right now and both paths represent much uncertainty and risks for operators that do not want to recognize the strategic implications of their capabilities.

Open or open source?

For those who know me, you know that I have been a firm supporter of openness by design for a long time. It is important not to conflate openness and open source when it comes to telco strategy, though.

Most network operators believe that any iteration of their network elements must be fully interoperable within their internal ecosystem (their network) and their external ecosystem (other telco networks). This is fundamentally what allows any phone user to roam and use any mobile networks around the planet.
This need for interoperability has reinforced the importance of standards such as ETSI and 3GPP and forums such as GSMA over the last 20 years. This interoperability by design has led to the creation of rigid interfaces, protocols and datagrams that preside over how network elements should integrate and interface in a telco and IP network.
While this model has worked well for the purpose of creating a unified global aggregation of networks with 3G/4G, departing from the fragmentation of 2G (GSM, CDMA, TDMA, AMPS...), it has also somewhat slowed down and stifled the pace of innovation for network functions.

The last few years have seen an explosion of innovation in networks, stemming from the emergence of data centers, clouds, SDN and virtualization. The benefits have been incredible, ranging from departing from proprietary hardware dependency, increased multi tenancy, resource elasticity, traffic programmability, automation and ultimately the atomization of network functions into microservices. This allowed the creation of higher level network abstractions without the need for low level programming or coding (for more on this, read anything ever written by the excellent Simon Wardley). These benefits have been systematically developed and enjoyed by those companies that needed to scale their networks the fastest: the webscalers.

In the process, as the technologies underlying these new networks passed from prototype, to product, to service, to microservice, they have become commoditized. Many of these technologies, once close to maturity, have been open sourced, allowing a community of similarly interested developers to flourish and develop new products and services.

Telecom operators were inspired by this movement and decided that they needed as well to evolve their networks to something more akin to an elastic cloud in order to decorrelate traffic growth from cost. Unfortunately, the desire for interoperability and the lack of engineering development resources led operators to try to influence and drive the development of a telco open source ecosystem without really participating in it. NFV (Networks function Virtualization) and telco Openstack are good examples of great ideas with poor results.Let's examine why:

NFV was an attempt to separate hardware from software, and stimulate a new ecosystem of vendors to develop telco functions in a more digital fashion. Unfortunately, the design of NFV was a quasi literal transposition of appliance functions, with little influence from SDN or micro service architecture. More importantly, it relied on an orchestration function that was going to become the "app store" of the network. This orchestrator, to be really vendor agnostic would have to be fully interoperable with all vendors adhering to the standard and preferably expose open interfaces to allow interchangeability of the network functions, and orchestrator vendors. In practice, none of the traditional telecom equipment manufacturers had plans to integrate with a third party orchestrators and would try to deploy their own as a condition for deploying their network functions. Correctly identifying the strategic risk, the community of operators started two competing open source projects: Open Source Mano (OSM) and Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP).
Without entering into the technical details, both projects suffered at varying degree from a cardinal sin. Open source development is not a spectator sport. You do not create an ecosystem or a community of developer. You do not demand contribution, you earn it. The only way open source projects are successful is if their main sponsors actively contribute (code, not diagrams or specs) and if the code goes into production and its benefits are easily illustrated. In both cases, most operators have opted on relying heavily on third party to develop what they envisioned, with insufficient real life experience to ensure the results were up to the task. Only those who roll their sleeves and develop really benefit from the projects.

Openstack was, in comparison, already a successful ecosystem and open source development forum when telco operators tried to bend it to their purpose. It had been deployed in many industries, ranging from banking, insurances, transportation, manufacturing, etc... and had a large developer community. Operators thought that piggybacking on this community would accelerate development and of an OpenStack suited for telco operation. The first efforts were to introduce traditional telco requirements (high availability, geo redundancy, granular scalability...) into a model that was fundamentally a best effort IT cloud infrastructure management. As I wrote 6 years ago, OpenStack at that stage was ill-suited for the telco environment. And it remained so. Operators resisted hiring engineers and coding sufficient functions into OpenStack to make it telco grade, instead relying on their traditional telco vendors to do the heavy lifting for them.

The lessons here are simple.
If you want to build a network that is open by design, to ensure vendor independence, you need to manage the control layer yourself. In all likeliness, tring to specify it and asking others to build it for you will fail if you've never built one before yourself.
Open source can be a good starting point, if you want to iterate and learn fast, prototype and test, get smart enough to know what is mature, what can should be bought, what should be developed and where is differential value. Don't expect open source to be a means for others to do your labour. The only way you get more out of open source than you put in is a long term investment with real contribution, not just guidance and governance.

GSMAOneAPI: One API to rule them all?

In June 2010, the GSMA released the specifications for its GSMAOneAPI. “A set of APIs that expose network capabilities over HTTP. OneAPI is developed in public and based on existing Web standards and principles. Any network operator or service provider is able to implement OneAPI.”

The API is based on xml/SOAP, its version 2, available since June 2011 includes SMS, MMS, Location and Payments as well as Voice Call Control, Data Connection Profile and Device Capability.

A live pilot implementation is ongoing in Canada with Bell, Rogers and Telus. It provides the capability for a content provider to enable cross network features such as messaging, call and data control. It is powered by Aepona.

The interesting fact about this API is that for the first time, it exposes some data control indication inherent to the core and RAN networks to potential external content providers or aggregators.

I went through an interesting demonstration on the GSMAOneAPI stand at Mobile World Congress 2012 by a small company called StreamOne, out of the Netherlands.

The company uses the API to retrieve from the operator the bearer the device is currently connected on. Additional extensions to the API currently under consideration by GSMA include download speed, upload speed and latency. These data points, when available to the content providers and aggregators could go a great way towards making techniques such as Adaptive Bit Rate more mobile friendly and potentially make way for a real bandwidth negotiation between network and provider. It might be the beginning of a practical approach to two sided business models to monetize quality of experience and service of OTT data traffic. As seen here, ABR is lacking capabilities to provide both operators and content providers with the control they need.

Of course, when looking at the standardization track, these efforts take years to translate into commercial deployments, but the seed is there and if network operators deploy it, if content providers use it, we could see a practical implementation in the next 3-5 years. Whant to know more about practical uses and ABR alternatives, check here.