Two global leaders in mobile communications and technology this week announced in Barcelona a groundbreaking collaboration community including many of the world’s Tier One mobile operators, cloud service providers, application and platform developers, and others who have been collaborating on rolling out “CAMARA - The Telco Global API Alliance.”
This ambitious new project brings together ecosystem players to address industry API interoperability, leveraging GSMA OPG requirements and Linux Foundation’s Developer Ecosystem.
Coming together with the GSMA, a global industry organization unifying the mobile ecosystem to discover, develop and deliver innovation foundational to positive business environments and societal change, this new global partnership will address challenges in porting and reproducing API services across heterogeneous operator and cloud architectures.
CAMARA is supported by leading industry organizations, including AT&T, Capgemini, Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson, GSMA, IBM, Google Cloud, Kandy, KDDI, Microsoft, MobiledgeX, Nokia, Orange, NGNM, Scenera, T-Mobile US, TIM, Telefonica, TELUS, The Linux Foundation, and Vodafone.
CAMARA will help customer and developer ecosystems by developing an open, global, and accessible API solution with access to operator capabilities, whichever networks customers are in, allowing applications to run consistently between telco networks and different countries.
“We are thrilled to enter into this next chapter of collaboration with the GSMA,” said Arpit Joshipura, general manager, Networking, Edge and IoT, the Linux Foundation. “By harnessing existing open source communities within CNCF, LF Networking, LF Edge and aligning to GSMA’s OPG industry requirements, we are poised to address current challenges in API accessibility.”
“The Operator Platform initiative welcomes new members to join more than 40 leading operators and 35 ecosystem partners, already working together on requirements and APIs. This type of collaboration with CAMARA is essential in accelerating scale to meet today’s integration demands,” said Henry Calvert, Head of Networks, GSMA. “We are very pleased to be working with Linux Foundation and our membership on developing reliability and resilience in APIs and simplifying challenges for our developer communities.”
For many years, APIs have played a very important role in developing mobile applications, and with the advent of 5G hyper-fast wireless communications, analysts agree that the potential of new applications, in categories including SMS, MMS, and RCS, webRTC, payment APIs, voice APIs, maps & location APIs, identity management APIs, and many others is unlimited.
CAMARA offers new opportunities for collaboration between network and cloud players to address the challenges of porting and reproducing API services across heterogeneous operator architectures.
The Telco API world has been growing steadily over the last decade, and that growth is now being fueled by the acceleration of 5G networking which will deliver unprecedented speeds and more exciting, real-time user experiences, including virtual reality, augmented reality, and AI-driven applications such as hyper-personalized ad serving.
5G networks provide 50x more speed, 10x less latency, and 1,000x more capacity than 4G/LTE.1. 5G can connect more devices and transmit more data than ever before, delivering fast connectivity and significantly enhanced user experiences, which is where limitless, creative API-driven use cases come into play.
According to Transparency Market Research, the global telecom API market is anticipated to reach ~US$ 1 Trn by 2030. The telecom API market is projected to expand at a CAGR of ~19% from 2020 to 2030 based on revenue. According to the report, North America was a significant contributor to the telecom API market in terms of revenue in 2019. The prominent market share of the region is due to the high adoption of telecom APIs, and the increasing adoption of 5G, especially in the U.S. and Canada. The telecom API market in the Asia Pacific is also expected to expand at a high CAGR during the forecast period.
A close collaboration has been set up between the CAMARA project and the GSMA’s Operator Platform initiative that is defining a federated platform solution for exposing operator network capabilities to external applications. This collaboration will ensure that developers relying on the CAMARA project’s API solution and abstraction will facilitate users across operator networks.
More details about the GSMA’s Operator Platform initiative (and its closely related Telco Edge Cloud activity) can be found at https://www.gsma.com/operatorplatform.
Learn more about CAMARA during MWC Barcelona in keynote session of: https://www.mwcbarcelona.com/agenda/session/cloud-edge-a-new-approach-to-innovation
More details about “CAMARA - The Telco Global API Alliance” are also available via GitHub: https://github.com/camaraproject.
Edited by
Luke Bellos
