The State of Telecom APIs

About this paper

Telecom is the only sector I have scored that built itself a real, open, industry-wide API standard with no mandate forcing it. CAMARA defines the network APIs as OpenAPI on GitHub under the Linux Foundation. GSMA Open Gateway is the operator commitment layer. Aduna, the Ericsson-led joint venture with the major carriers, is the commercial channel. The GSMA’s own Head of Future Networks told me plainly why it exists: OneAPI was a spectacular failure, and this time the industry decided to stop writing specifications as documentation and start writing them as code.

The form was right. This report is about what happened next. Eighty-three organizations scored, averaging 42.1 with a genuine Exemplar — and six bodies that sell nothing publishing 351 freely downloadable contracts in which every server declaration is a template variable and every discovery URL is a placeholder. You can download the entire standard and call none of it. Exactly one operator on earth publishes a CAMARA contract you can price and call self-serve. The full report maps the gap category by category, names where the industry’s own aggregator publishes nothing, and discloses in full where these scores rest on artifacts API Evangelist generated rather than providers published.

What's inside

1. Executive summary — the industry that standardised itself
2. The state of the sector — scar tissue, and a second attempt
3. The resource taxonomy — three populations, three shapes
4. CAMARA — the standard, and the gap
5. The two exposure platforms — and why only one is reachable
6. The composite Kin Score — and the provenance caveat
7. Agent-readiness — corrected
8. The blueprint
9. Security, auth and consent
10. Provider-by-provider intelligence
11. The investable thesis
12. Where this is going

What you get for $500.00