The telco industry is witnessing a major shift as carriers evolve from pure connectivity providers to innovation platforms through network APIs.
In a detailed discussion, we sat down with Nokia's VP of Network Monetization Platform Shkumbin Hamiti and Orange's Network APIs Director Otilia Anton, who share insights into this transformation.
Industry forecasts project an $8-10 billion market opportunity by 2030. Orange has already launched commercial offers in France and Spain, while Nokia's platform has attracted over 45 partners, presenting unified network capabilities to developers globally.
“The concept of network API is essentially opening up a rich base of capabilities that these networks have to developers in a form of APIs or SDKs,” Hamiti tells us.
This approach enables innovations such as remote ship piloting at Port of Antwerp, which utilizes device location and quality of service APIs to enhance port operations.
Anton emphasizes the importance of 5G SA deployment in enabling differentiated services: “With a standalone approach, we'll have access into really differentiated services, ultra-low latency, more opportunities to leverage edge computing,” he says.
Both leaders stress the need for simplicity and standardization to avoid past industry challenges. The GSMA Open Gateway initiative, for example, represents a collaborative effort to ensure consistent API development across the industry.
Looking ahead to 2025, which Hamiti calls “the moment of truth” for network API business models, the focus remains on delivering replicable use cases and accelerating innovation, particularly as AI integration opens new possibilities for connectivity services.
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Stephen M. Saunders MBE:
So this concept of network APIs or API aggregators is really taking off, gaining traction. I mean, how does this business model lead to new revenue opportunities for CSPs?
Shkumbin Hamiti:
When you look at the telecom industry and the way it has developed in the past 30 years, one could argue that the business model has remained the same, more or less. The telecom providers, carriers around the world have provided connectivity to their customers. Now with advanced 4G and 5G networks, the capabilities that those networks carry enables carriers to do something more beyond pure connectivity. The carriers are seeing an opportunity to make a shift from a pure connectivity provider to building a platform that is used for innovation, very similar to all other digital ecosystem plays out there. And the key path to making that happen is enable access to the capabilities of the network to those who can actually create innovation on that platform. And typically those innovators are the developers. The concept of network API is essentially opening up a rich base of capabilities that these networks have, open those up to developers in a form of APIs or SDKs and let them innovate and create innovative services on top of those carriers' platforms. That's really the essence of the network API.
Stephen M. Saunders MBE:
Otilia, does that resonate with you?
Otilia Anton:
Definitely. Fully aligned with Shkumbin's vision, and I might add that a programmable economy is now a reality and that the APIs are a cornerstone for that. And we want from the operator side to bring that flexibility into connectivity and network insights and bring those as levers for innovation as it is definitely not the first time we as operators are working on APIs at that scale and the maturity of it. So our networks are now much more modern than in the past, cloud-native, AI-empowered, and being really able to provide an on-demand and personalized connectivity. And in this context, that brings the opportunity of additional business models. For instance, in terms of opportunity, there are forecasts on the market for eight to $10 billion by 2030 on this market. And we see it as a lever for growth, for innovation, and as a transformation opportunity for the telecom industry.
Stephen M. Saunders MBE:
Shkumbin, how are you supporting CSPs in monetizing services using these new APIs?
Shkumbin Hamiti:
We have worked on solving one of the key challenges for the industry, and that is how do we present to developers a unified view and a perception of the global availability of the capabilities, remove the fragmentation that the developers inherently hate. So we launched a platform that we call Network it's called. In essence, that platform is a vehicle for exposing network APIs to developers at the same time providing a radically simplified experience of working with the telecom capabilities to developers globally. So as you can imagine, the developers are using a multitude of APIs to serve their own, whatever, digital experience needs. So they use APIs from the finance industry, they use APIs from let's say travel mapping and so on. What we are providing here are the APIs that they would use them and consume them in a very similar way as they consume everything else. And those network APIs are then collected or built through an aggregation by going operator by operator and creating unified view and unified service towards the developers. Since we started, we've added more than 45 partners onto our platform. And we think that 2025 is the year when we will see it'll be, in essence, the moment of truth whether the network API business model will work for the operators and whether that will generate the value that we all expect. I'm very optimistic that this will happen.
Stephen M. Saunders MBE:
Well, I mean let's ask Otilia. How would you evaluate at Orange our industry's progress in opening up networks to third party application developers to take advantage of all of these capabilities?
Otilia Anton:
As first contributors towards initiatives like Kamara or Open Gateway since 2021, 2022, we are very proud of the progress that was made, especially in the past 18 months. At Orange, we're committed to bring this live and we have commercial offers in France and Spain. This opportunity is about making access to networking capabilities in a simple, secure manner. And our ability to be easy to work with and reachable by developer communities is really important. It is really important to bring that scale and simplicity, consistency, predictability. And it implies that we also perform a deeper transformation at operator level in the way to provide network-as-a-service. And we have the opportunity now with 5G SA arriving on key markets to make this happen at a different scale. Because 5G, by default, it is a cloud-native technology. And with a standalone approach, we'll have now access into really differentiated services, ultra-low latency, more opportunities to leverage edge computing and thus bring levers for innovation for the others. And that's what we have been trying to shape with Nokia to really calibrate valuable use cases based on customer demand.
Stephen M. Saunders MBE:
Aren't the use cases, Otilia, are they mainly in vertical industry?
Otilia Anton:
Depending on the API category we are addressing, yes. So for instance, identity and anti-fraud APIs that have been the first APIs to be opened at a broader scale by several operators. There, we'll be looking into verticals like banking, e-commerce, delivery. While for more network-as-a-service opportunities, we'll be looking into entertainment media, smart manufacturing, transportation.
Stephen M. Saunders MBE:
Well, and we don't know what some of the most exciting uses of this are going to be yet because they haven't been developed. Shkumbin, can you give us a couple of examples or an example of a usage of these Open APIs which Nokia is excited about?
Shkumbin Hamiti:
Just to say that we are still at the beginning. And just as you said, Steve, it's like you never know what use cases we will see once these network APIs are in the hands of the developers and application developers out there. Let's take an example of a use case that we drove together with Telenet in Belgium in Port of Antwerp where we enabled remote piloting of the ships within the Port of Antwerp. And we enabled that one by utilizing the network APIs, two of them specifically, which is the device location and the other one is quality of service on demand. What that enabled is that there are requirements in the port operations where a pilot has to get onto the big ship during the maneuvering inside the port. It's a human that is properly trained and specialized for that activity. That individual has to get from shore to the ship and then help the captain of the boat pilot the ship.
Now with this capability, we enable a guaranteed quality of service of a link. Therefore, this pilot will remain on shore and would be able to save tremendous amount of time in piloting the ship. And mind you, the number of ships that go through Port of Antwerp is about 50,000 per year. So we're talking about a very valuable capability for the port authority here. This is just one of the examples. I know we've also worked in Hackathon in VivaTech with Orange. And maybe, Otilia, you can also share some of your, what you've seen there as some of the interesting use cases.
Otilia Anton:
Indeed, working together on the Hackathon at VivaTech earlier this year was a great opportunity to reach out to French ecosystem and in addition to international startup ecosystem. And it illustrated that from this kind of initiatives, we are bringing live use cases that wouldn't have been possible without the APIs. For instance, with how can we use population density API to improve event management transportation. We used that kind of solution for the Olympic Games here in Paris with a product called Flux Vision. And Nokia, for instance, we work on worker safety, illustrating how quality on demand and location can help have real-time alerting and securing parameters in industrial areas in case of incidents.
Stephen M. Saunders MBE:
How do we avoid the same type of issue that we had with NFV where things become too complicated because there are too many different approaches? Because there are a lot of different approaches to OpenAPIs at the moment. Shkumbin, what's your take on this?
Shkumbin Hamiti:
What we are aware as an industry is that we really need to work together to overcome some of the issues that we as an industry have seen in the past. And the GSMA Open Gateway initiative is one of the initiatives which is actually trying to bring industry around a same concept and a same set of APIs. They drive the activity in the open source environment around Kamara, where we think by working together as an industry specifying those APIs, we would have a consistent set of those APIs that when the developers use, we would be able to hide that complexity that we talk about, because that's absolutely essential. And by actually being aware of the issue, I think we have a good chance of overcoming that.
Stephen M. Saunders MBE:
Yeah. You're going into it with your eyes open and we do have a lot of experience of how not to do this. Otilia, where are we on our journey to simplicity? Where is Orange right now in terms of what you need in order to monetize new services from these OpenAPIs?
Otilia Anton:
So we have been working a lot on making this happen. To your point on the simplicity, we need to focus on replicable use cases. There is a wide range from mobile to fixed APIs with the convergence space as well. And to be able to make this a successful business as an industry, we need to focus on what is replicable and do it at a higher speed to make it more widely available. So it started in several markets from Orange, but also from other operators in the identity and anti-fraud space. I would like to see that happening at a more accelerated pace also on more advanced network APIs because that will enable us to tap into customer experiences that are different from what we can see today and that are fully leveraging the promises of 5G SA. And as we have been all experimenting recently with gen AI, I think that the pace of innovation now between connectivity and AI will bring to the market things that we wouldn't have imagined a couple of years ago.
So it's how do we consistently deliver from the operator space and with partners to have robust solutions and that take away that complexity. So Orange, we are looking at this opportunity as a telco as a platform illustration. So it goes beyond traditional boundaries between teams and with a much more focused product approach. And trying, as you mentioned, Steve, not to dwell on the more legacy or solutions that can take a lot of time to develop. So we are trying to benefit from the new capabilities brought by new technologies in a seamless manner. And what we noticed with network API especially is that we were able in the past months to work with customers, with new customers that were directly attracted by these capabilities and that would have not necessarily come to see Orange on a traditional path for this kind of service.
Shkumbin Hamiti:
My perception of Orange having partnered with them now in several occasions during 2024, that Orange is at the forefront of this leading the change here. And it has been a great pleasure to work with the Orange team, with Otilia and her team on driving this. We are still at the beginning of the journey, it's very clear. But seeing what Orange and a few other leading operators are doing, I'm actually quite optimistic that maybe this time we are actually, we are going to succeed in making the change that was tried already 10 years ago in all honesty.
Stephen M. Saunders MBE:
I mean to me, this is sort of where the whole game is right now because digital industrialization, Industry 4.0, global digital economy is an irresistible force. It's just a question of where it happens at what cadence. Otilia, you feel optimistic about everything moving forward? You love your job obviously, but everything's going to... What keeps you awake at night, I guess as far as what's coming down the pike for you?
Otilia Anton:
I'm really optimistic about this opportunity because there are several estimations out there on what it will bring for the industry. But in addition to the financial opportunity, of course, I think the most important one for the telco industry is the one for change. It is an acceleration of our processes and it pushes us out of the comfort zone.
Shkumbin Hamiti:
But again, going back to what we, I think, have repeated several times, it has to be simple. We can't expect to have a 5G expertise in all the verticals that we're going to serve. It has to be simple that the developer can read the documentation, can see what a particular API does, and integrate into his or her application and have it running. That's the journey we are in. I wish we could go faster as an industry. That's my wish for 2025, that we get faster out there, we get faster into the hands of various developers. And we are certainly pushing together with Orange the boundaries to make this happen as fast as possible.
Stephen M. Saunders MBE:
Thanks, guys.