A group of leading mobile operators are banding together to create a standalone company tasked with coordinating their API efforts, a move aimed at reducing fragmentation in apps and services in collaboration with Ericsson and Google Cloud.

Vodafone Group; AT&T; Verizon; Bharti Airtel; Deutsche Telekom; Orange; Telefonica; Singtel; Reliance Jio; Telstra; T-Mobile US; and America Movil are teaming with Ericsson to create the venture, which will work to deliver common APIs and so broaden the field of app and service developer platforms they can access.

The operators aim to have the venture up and running in early 2025, with the group to hold a 50 per cent stake and Ericsson the remainder.

In a joint statement, the operators emphasised the new company’s work will be “in-keeping” with the GSMA’s Open Gateway initiative and be founded on a “deep understanding of developer and enterprise needs”.

The operators plan to open access to so-called hyperscale companies, communications platform-as-a-service providers, system integrators and independent software vendors. The set of common interfaces will be “based on existing industry-wide CAMARA APIs”, they stated, referring to an open-source project for developers driven by the Linux Foundation in collaboration with the GSMA.

Ericsson’s Vonage unit and Google Cloud are set to partner with the company “providing access to their ecosystems of millions of developers”.

Commentary
Kester Mann, director of Consumer and Connectivity with CCS Insight, believes the collaboration could be essential in the 5G era, where a “lack of tangible and attractive customer use cases” is restricting growth and unnerving investors.

He noted the operators’ plan to team up addresses fragmentation in their approach to apps and services in the 3G and 4G eras, a time when service providers had largely failed to deliver the right tools and opportunities for developers to create new services.

The involvement of Ericsson and Google means the new venture stands a better chance of success than past efforts to “monetise significant network investments”, Mann said.

But Darius Singh, director of consulting and enterprise platforms lead at STL Partners, noted the venture could be bad news for Nokia, albeit acknowledging it is yet unknown if the vendor will become a partner or competitor.

Singh was more confident on the positive impact the new company would have on Ericsson’s Vonage cloud unit, branding it “great” for its “global coverage and penetration within a market”, which he expects to increase its attractiveness for developers.

The analyst also expects the API venture to be more active than current efforts because it involves “real investment from operators”.

Singh predicted the venture would spur “more innovative monetisation approaches, with the potential for new KPIs and success metrics”.