Carriers Enthusiastic About Growing Use of Standardized APIs

Laura Lacarra, Telefonica's senior technology evangelist, stressed the importance of moving to a new paradigm where carriers deliver services through standardized application programmable interfaces (APIs). During an Informa Tech webinar Tuesday, Lacarra cited the work of GSMA and the “Open Gateway” initiative announced earlier this year (see 2302270069). Other experts at the webinar agreed on the importance of moving to APIs and shifting to the cloud.

Providers “have a lot of capabilities,” connecting millions of users and gathering lots of data, Lacarra said. What has been missing are solutions that work for more than one carrier, she said. “If we standardize … it will be a solution for all players, and it’s really powerful,” she said. “That’s the opportunity -- standardize everything as a unique API,” Lacarra added.

About 40 operators, representing 200 networks, are working together on the open gateway, Lacarra said. “They are happy to work together -- that is really good for the mobile ecosystem,” she said.

Anti-fraud technologies are some of the first to use APIs, said Ricardo Villarreal, principal product manager, Azure for Operators, at Microsoft. Banks and financial companies are willing to pay to detect fraud because the cost savings are immediate, he said. “It’s not just about a new service, it’s not just about a next-generation product, but it’s more about solving a problem,” he said.

Sylvain Morel, Orange network API program leader, mentioned anti-fraud apps, APIs for location and IoT management as early use cases. Companies are interested in having real-time information, he said. Added Lacarra, drones are another use case because they need “perfect connectivity.”

Most operators believe they will see a savings of 15% or less in their IT costs from moving operations to the cloud, based on a recent Heavy Reading survey, said Jennifer Clark, principal analyst-cloud infrastructure and edge computing at the firm. Some are more optimistic and expect savings as high as 30%.

Providers expect improved efficiency and operations and lower hardware costs from moving to the cloud, as well as reduced staff and maintenance costs, Clark said. “All is not rosy,” with security a top concern. Providers also worry about the complexity of operations, a lack of skilled workers to support the move to a cloud-native network and the lack of a cloud-native strategy, she said. These concerns are “top of mind” for providers as they look to move the cloud, she said.

Carriers face a “long laundry list” of challenges and the list “only gets longer,” Clark said. “There’s a lot of promise … and there are a lot of challenges,” she said.

AT&T started “the journey” to an open-stack based cloud in 2013-2014, virtualizing a packet core and deploying it on the AT&T integrated cloud, said Vikram Seenappa, a member of the carrier's technical staff. As a next step, based on lessons learned, AT&T built a private network cloud, he said. That cloud is still running and carries all AT&T's non-stand-alone and stand-alone 5G traffic, he said. The next transformation will be moving to an Azure Operator Nexus cloud using Microsoft tech, Seenappa said. “It’s a hybrid, on-premise cloud that’s going to be running in our data center,” he said.

The advantage of a cloud-native network is that it allows continuous integration and development, Seenappa said. It also offers a common framework and “we don’t need to build an automation framework specific to a vendor,” he said. “We can’t be building tools around each and every vendor” because “we operate in a multivendor environment,” he said.

A cloud-native network also means AT&T is no longer dependent on vendor-provided operations support and business support systems, Seenappa said. It can be adopted across multiple businesses, and allows the use of AI, he said. Providers can also patch or make changes to a network while it’s still running, he said.