Mobile operators establish joint venture for network APIs

A group of major international network operators is setting up a joint venture with equipment supplier Ericsson to market interfaces for their mobile networks. The joint venture will bring together the APIs of the various networks under one roof and offer them to customers such as cloud providers, hyperscalers, platform operators and software manufacturers. The company to be founded does not yet have a name.

The establishment of the joint venture is expected to be completed in the first half of 2025, the network operators involved announced on Thursday. In addition to Ericsson, which will hold a 50 percent stake in the joint venture, Deutsche Telekom, Telefónica, Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile USA, Verizon, AT&T, Telstra, América Móvil and others are also involved.

"Decisive moment"

"Today is a defining moment for the mobile industry and a milestone in our strategy to open up networks for new revenue opportunities", says Ericsson CEO Börje Ekholm. "The global API platform creates unified access for millions of developers."

The joint venture builds on the Open Gateway Initiative launched by the network operator association GSMA at MWC Barcelona 2023. The aim is to create standardized access to telecommunications services regardless of the infrastructure.

The Open Gateway Initiative is contributing its interfaces to the "Camara" project, which is based at the Linux Foundation. The new company is also committed to this. "This collaboration will drive forward the GSMA Open Gateway initiative and provide customers with standardized Camara APIs," says Telefónica CEO José María Álvarez-Pallete.

The new joint venture will now create a commercial provider to market the interfaces. The partnership will enable companies and developers to develop new applications for global telecommunications networks. "Access to the 5G network via interfaces is fundamentally changing the telecommunications industry," says Vodafone CEO Margherita Della Valle.

The functions of modern 5G networks provided via APIs were previously inaccessible to developers. Examples include the verification of financial transactions, checking the quality of service or location verification for applications.

"Simplified significantly now"

"Until now, anyone developing digital applications that use information from the network had to talk to each individual network operator and build an individual solution for their network", explains Tanja Richter, Head of Technology at Vodafone Germany. "This is now much simpler."

Other network operators are invited to join the joint venture. "We encourage other telecommunications providers to join to expand and further develop this ecosystem", says Deutsche Telekom CEO Tim Höttges. Talks are currently still underway with Three Sweden, for example.

(vbr)