What is 5G? At best, it’s a faster 4G. At worst, it’s a 4G that can’t get through walls. The consumer was teased with futuristic concepts of distributed musicians, five-second movie downloads, and remote surgeons — none of which materialized. The definition and usefulness of 5G varies greatly, but it generally lacks excitement across the board. The wireless industry believes network APIs will change all that. Last week, Ericsson announced a new joint venture that will offer developers network-level APIs for a variety of new use cases.
Sound familiar? It should. It’s the story that Ericsson cited when it acquired Vonage. It’s the story Nokia touted when it partnered with Infobip and Google. It’s a story AWS shared about its own 5G APIs. The wireless providers have been on this quest for some time. There’s the GSMA Open Gateway initiative to provide a framework of common network APIs designed to provide universal access to some 750 mobile operators for developers. There’s also the Camara alliance which develops APIs for access to operator network capabilities.
The idea is that network APIs can make applications richer or more secure in various ways. For example, the Number Verification API can authenticate a mobile device, or the SIM Swap API can provide details of when the SIM was activated. Developers can also request higher quality of service by requesting stable latency or throughput for specific application data flows. These are just a few examples of the many capabilities that developers can add to their applications using network-level 5G APIs.
As a 5G network equipment supplier, Ericsson has a vested interest in making 5G more relevant and believes network APIS will be appealing to SaaS providers and enterprises. That’s why it created its Global Network Platform, but that wasn’t getting traction. It acquired Vonage to get access to API professionals, but that wasn’t sufficient. Now, it has spun out its platform and pieces of Vonage into a new, unnamed, non-profit company. Ericsson owns half of it and 12 major wireless providers own the other half. These include companies such as América Móvil, AT&T, Bharti Airtel, Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Reliance Jio, Singtel, Telefónica, Telstra, T-Mobile, Verizon and Vodafone.
Network APIs clearly offer a lot of potential but seem to be perpetually coming soon. There are two issues; first, mobile providers are fiercely independent, so the vision of global APIs that seamlessly work across all wireless providers is a bit aspirational. It only took 15 years for them to (mostly) agree on RCS, which required a lot of uphill-stone-rolling from Google. Ericsson is attempting to play that role with 5G network APIs. The other issue is that it’s unclear how much the market values or will utilize these network APIs.
McKinsey got Ericsson and the mobile providers excited when it published the global market for network APIs could be worth as much as $330 billion in five to seven years. However, most of that revenue is the actual subscription and use revenue related to new 5G applications; the revenue that API services will generate only represents about 3% of that total. That is probably why this newly created, unnamed company is being set up as a nonprofit organization.
For these APIs to be attractive, they must be consistent globally. It’s certainly possible and logical, but we’ve seen how these providers can have their own ideas about their own networks. This new strategy is an “if we build it they will come” model.
I am not convinced. Though wireless is our future, most networks still leverage wired connections. Few SaaS apps can be built with an all-wireless assumption. Evidently, Verizon agrees and just announced plans to acquire the largest pure-play fiber internet provider in the US. Verizon is willing to pay $20 billion to acquire Frontier’s 2.2 million fiber subscribers to extend Verizon’s network reach to 25 million premises across 31 states and Washington, D.C.
The day before Ericsson announced its new joint venture with 12 service providers, Bandwidth hosted its Reverb event. The conference was about the expansion of the provider’s Universal Platform.
Founder and CEO David Morken opened the event with a swipe at CPaaS providers, "We don't just develop APIs here at Bandwidth that run on other companies' networks. We deliver the power to communicate through APIs over our owned-and-operated, carrier-grade infrastructure.” Bandwidth now has reach into 67 countries. Morten continued, “This single source experience gives our customers the freedom to simplify their global operations by consolidating carriers and tapping into feature-rich software.”
The Bandwidth conference highlighted programmable voice features such as anonymizing calls and real-time transcriptions; analytics for MOS and jitter; dynamic emergency services; simplified integrations with Teams, Webex, Five9, Zoom, and others; advanced messaging services for SMS and RCS; number reputation services; and more.
Bandwidth is a single provider; it doesn’t need to align its customers/partners like Ericsson is doing with its new non-profit. As a result, Bandwidth can cite existing API/integration customers such as Amazon, Microsoft, Cisco, and Zoom today. Bandwidth’s initiatives and vision are not directly comparable to what Ericsson announced as Bandwidth is mostly optimized around voice, and Ericsson’s push is around wireless network-level APIs. However, Bandwidth is just one example.
Network and CPaaS providers offer developers APIs that work globally. Specialized wireless APIs, such as SIM swap, do have value – but they only apply to wireless users. Bandwidth cited that it’s processing 4 billion messages per month today, and its Universal Profile announcements are not all online yet.
Ericsson’s ambitious push for 5G relevance feels like a rerun, and I’m fairly certain it will end with yet another new initiative to create network-level APIs for wireless networks. The complexity of aligning service providers to deliver something developers haven’t been clamoring for is daunting. Even if successful, the GSMA represents almost 700 more providers that aren’t owners of the joint venture Ericsson announced.
Meanwhile, companies like Bandwidth are quietly succeeding with programmable communications on their own infrastructure. Whatever the outcome, I wish Ericsson the best of luck as it would be nice if 5G would do more than 4G.
Dave Michels is a Contributing Editor and analyst at TalkingPointz.
