Telcos are recognizing that in order to monetize the potential inherent in cloud-native networks, they must simplify the interface for developers
While open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) were a big topic at this and last year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona thanks to the GSMA Open Gateway Initiative, APIs in general are not a new concept for telcos. What is new, according to Principal Analyst at STL Partners Emma Buckland, is the potential to expose the networks to a large audience of developers through open, non-proprietary APIs. At this year’s Telco Cloud and Edge Forum, Buckland moderated a panel with fellow experts to examine some of the biggest challenges opening up the API ecosystem might present, even as it promises a potential path to new revenue.
A complex chain of aggregators
Telcos are urgently seeking ROI as the deployment of 5G Standalone (SA) advances in tandem with the cloud-native network, and as such, are recognizing that in order to monetize the potential inherent in cloud-native networks, they must simplify the interface for developers. In an open API ecosystem, telcos, in general, will sell their network APIs to developers, either through their own platforms or via aggregators or hyperscalers. And then some aggregators might be aggregating APIs coming from another aggregator. This, Buckland pointed out, is quite complicated.
“You’d be a fool not to be in favor of this, but you’d also be a fool… to ignore the commercial and human friction that’s going to be added,” said panelist David Rolfe, head of product marketing at Volt Active Data. He explained that a complex chain of developers and aggregators makes it difficult to assess which vendor is responsible when things go wrong, and so guaranteeing quality of service becomes a challenge. As a result, extensive monitoring and diagnostics will be critical so ensure that you understand what’s not working and why it’s not working. A lot of the time, he continued, will be “simply the system watching itself.”
But whose job is it to do this observation? “If I’ve got a downstream customer saying, ‘Hey, my app isn’t working.’ Who investigates? Who owns the problem?” Rolfe continued. “You can have layers and layers of people in between you and that could actually undermine the commercial success of this if we … don’t have clear chains of accountability and clear ways of handing off responsibility.”
Ensuring network capability
The network must also be capable of responding to the request of the API. “Features like … dynamic slicing, you want to make sure that even before you open this up to the market, you have these underlying functionalities that a 5G SA core is supposed to provide,” said Anil Kollipara, VP of product management, test and assurance at Spirent Communications. “Take … latency as an example. The network APIs, because it’s an API, either the requester can request variable metrics or variable levels of latencies through profiles, so you want to make sure that your network can support 30-millisecond latency, right? There’s a performance aspect purely from a quality of service… perspective. You want to make sure that your network is ready to handle those kinds of requests.”
Rolfe agreed: “If you’re going to offer quality of service, you damn well better be able to deliver it … there has to be measurement, it’s almost meta-APIs may be needed to monitor the performance of the API and who’s using it, and how it’s being used,” he stated.
Heightened security risks
KORE Wireless’ VP Engineering and Platform Development Jorrit Kronjee reminded event attendees not to forget about the security risks opening up APIs presents. “You need to think about potential denial-of-service attacks, but you also need to think about what kind of data may I be leaking inadvertently through this API,” he said. Therefore, he continued, telcos must be thinking seriously about security as open APIs is new territory for them, even if they already have a good approach to network security in general.
Basically, in an era of open APIs, API security issues typically seen in the enterprise space — denial-of-service attacks, distributed denial-of-service attack, man-in-the-middle attacks, and so on — are now applicable to the telecom networks. “API management solutions would have to be rolled out and plenty of security testing before things become public,” Kronjee argued.
But the biggest risk of all? Missing out
This isn’t to say that there aren’t critical opportunities for telcos in open APIs. Noël Wirzius, who is the product lead of network APIs Camara and Open Gateway at Deutsche Telekom, shared that interest in leveraging APIs into the cellular network is, in fact, quite widespread. Specifically, the carrier is seeing traction in the automotive industry, where there is a growing focus on what 5G SA can bring to the future generation of cars. Streaming companies and manufacturers also top the list, he added. “It’s really, really big focus,” he said. “It’s not like one area of customer, one type of customer. I think it’s really nearly every industry can be covered with this API… it’s really hopefully everywhere in the future.”
Kollipara added: “You lose a 100% of the shots that you don’t take, so the biggest risk in my opinion is losing out on the opportunity … We’ve had wounds from the past; we’ve lost a lot of revenue in the telco industry to the outside players, so the biggest risk in my opinion is not taking the opportunity.”
