Ericsson and Telcos Bringing Intelligence to Mobile Networks

Let’s call it the curse of the dumb pipes.

Despite their intentions, major telcos and their network infrastructure partners around the world haven’t been able to take advantage of the mobile phone-driven solutions that have transformed our personal and professional lives. However, thanks to a new joint venture that network equipment provider Ericsson just announced, in conjunction with many of the largest telco providers in the world, that situation could—and should—start to change.

But first, some history.

For decades now, major telco providers around the world have been talking about how they wanted to offer additional value to a set of business customers—particularly mobile platforms and developers of mobile apps—by offering intelligence within their networks. The problem is, or at least was, that almost every carrier offered their own set of APIs (application programming interfaces) to get access to the capabilities offered on their networks.

Practically speaking, that meant developers who wanted to create an application that took advantage of a particular network’s capabilities had to adapt and rework that application if they wanted it to also run on other networks. In real-world terms, that was a completely untenable solution, and as a result, very few developers created apps that leveraged capabilities from the network. Instead, they focused their efforts on the standardized APIs that leveraged compute and storage capabilities in the cloud and just used whatever network was available as, well, a dumb pipe.

The bottom-line result? Telcos saw virtually no monetary benefits from the explosion of mobile applications that transformed how we work and live over the last few decades and, instead, got stuck with the bill for handling all the additional traffic these apps created.

Needless to say, major telco networks around the world have been eager to change that situation. Thanks to the newly announced, still-to-be-named joint venture (expected to be finalized in the first half of 2025) that’s half-owned by Ericsson and half-owned by all its mobile network partners, the anticipated major change could finally come to fruition.

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After a staggering amount of corporate cat herding and legal wrangling, this group of industry partners has come together to create a shared business that standardizes and monetizes a set of global network API standards. Importantly, all these standards are open and can be freely supported not only by any service provider, but by any network equipment infrastructure provider as well (yes, including Nokia and Samsung Networks).

Practically speaking, this means that mobile app developers can start to leverage a single, common set of APIs that are expected to work across most of the world’s major mobile networks. Compared to the crazy hodge-podge of individual network standards, this is an enormous leap forward that makes the possibility of mobile app developers creating new apps or new capabilities within existing apps by leveraging these standardized APIs a much more realistic scenario. Importantly, for the major carriers, this, in turn, translates into the ability to finally monetize the mobile revolution and create new revenue streams for themselves.

Of course, convincing mobile app developers who aren’t used to having to pay any portion of their revenues to carriers will undoubtedly be a bit challenging. However, given the enormous potential reach that a set of truly global API standards will enable is likely to be a very tempting target as well. Plus, by leveraging the GSMA’s Open Gateway initiative and the open source CAMARA APIs as a starting point to build these new network programming standards, the new joint venture is building from a known base of work. Being able to leverage network- and service provider-based intelligence on things like login authentication, location verification, identity, age verification, network verification, real-time network traffic, and much more gives this set of APIs powerful capabilities that should be very attractive to a wide range of app developers. On top of that, the new joint venture has also enlisted both Google Cloud and Ericsson’s Vonage division to help with their efforts to make the APIs as widely available as possible to the huge number of mobile developers who currently use those platforms.

The inclusion of Vonage is particularly interesting and actually sheds some new light on the reason why Ericsson bought the company in the first place. In essence, it seems the learnings that Ericsson gleamed from Vonage and its existing base of communications-focused APIs helped Ericsson realize both the business potential of monetizing APIs and the critical importance of having a widely available, standardized set of offerings. To be clear, Ericsson is not including the Vonage APIs into the standard set of shared, open-source offerings that the joint venture will be delivering, but there’s little doubt that Ericsson’s experience with Vonage has played a critical role in helping them organize this industry-wide effort.

Evolving the critical network pipes that have been effectively delivering the cellular traffic at the heart of the mobile revolution into a new source of revenue for both carriers and equipment makers has been—pardon the pun—a pipe dream for some time. However, the combination of the enormously impressive coordination behind this effort and the practical real-world benefits of the open-source network APIs that it’s offering makes it feel like the time has finally come. After all, getting representatives from all these carriers into a single room is often a hard enough task, but getting them all behind a shared goal is even more extraordinary.

It may take a while before the “curse of the dumb pipes” finally disappears from the telco industry’s vocabulary, but it finally feels like we’re moving in that direction.

Disclosure: TECHnalysis Research is a tech industry market research and consulting firm and, like all companies in that field, works with many technology vendors as clients, some of whom may be listed in this article.