NEW ORLEANS – The GSM Association announced the commercial launch of its OpenAPI gateway, along with its adoption by a consortium of three mobile network operators in Canada – Bell Canada, Rogers and Telus. The gateway offers application developers the ability to connect to and use a standard set of application programming interfaces (APIs). Because the platform was adopted by several Canadian operators, the gateway will allow applications to operate regardless of which operator network and device the mobile subscriber is using. Per the GSMA, this will result in reduced time to market and integration costs related to designing and rolling out new apps.
While the concept of open APIs is not new – Alcatel-Lucent has had an open API service available for nearly two and a half years, while individual operators such as Belgacom have already adopted an open API policy – the GSMA’s release does indicate that this is the first instance of multiple operators in the same market all agreeing to open their APIs in collaboration with each other.
According to Lynnette Luna, Senior Analyst at Current Analysis, there are several meaningful implications to today’s news, “Obviously developers want to be able to write an application once and be able to port it across carrier networks and devices. In that sense, this is a positive development since three major Canadian operators have signed on.”
Going further, Ana Tavaras Lattibeaudiere, Head of Connected Living at the GSMA told RCR Wireless News that this development in one in a broader context of activities designed to make interaction between carriers and app developers more efficient.
However, beyond making life easier on developers, Luna points out that there could be interesting service level differentiation opportunities available to the Canadians, which could lead to additional network monetization scenarios, “In the sense that the applications can be up and running very quickly is a good thing for operators in terms of monetizing apps. I also like the idea of carrier billing payment APIs where a variable price can be charged to the consumer. Mobile broadband players need to incorporate more variable pricing schemes whereby high quality video can be charged a different rate than best effort video.”
Beyond the short term commercial implications, however, Luna also indicated that this could ultimately give way to a more standards based approach to homogenizing app interfaces. “Longer term, one could question the relevance of this as HTML5 becomes the write-once platform. But, HTML5 is still not stable enough for solid-cross-platform app performance, so we could see the OneAPI initiative morph into an HTML5 initiative.”
Key Takeaways
- Although the concept of open APIs is far from new, the fact that the GSMA secured adoption from a consortium of competitors on a nationwide basis represents, arguably, the largest scale embrace of open APIs in the mobile communications industry. The clear implication being that as the GSMA is able to showcase any successes that Bell Canada, Rogers and/or Telus have as a result of participating in the initiative, it could incent additional cooperation from operators in other countries, or regions.
- While the ability to write an app once and be able to deploy it across multiple operator networks is appealing to both developers and operators alike, from a pragmatic perspective the potential for enhancing variable pricing capabilities could be the key development to come out of this release. As carriers seek incremental network monetization opportunities, the ability to tie pricing to the performance of an app could be an effective arrow in an operator’s pricing quiver.
- Ultimately, the GSMA would be well served to use the OneAPI gateway as a means of contributing to standards developments that will make open APIs broadly palatable to operators on a global basis. Initiatives such as HTML5 could provide a broadly accepted platform writing applications. In any case, the work that the GSMA has already done means that it could have valuable input into the ultimate adoption process which could, in turn, benefit its membership.
