Alliances like CAMARA usually fail for a few reasons:
1. Telcos want all new features to be purely additive. They're not willing to expose API calls that are even slightly uncomfortable or might cannibalize existing business, for the same reasons as above. As a result you get features no one really asked for.
2. Alliances often fail due to competitive dynamics. The moment a telco group that competes with another telco group or a geopolitically inconvenient telco joins the alliance, work often stops.
3. Inability to find long-term alignment on vision and continuity.
Producing an API would also not solve for all the other operational & regulatory reasons telcos are tough to work with.
The same way the music, movie, and banking industries haven't produces their own digital layer, true innovation in the space will only come from OTT players that create globally scalable infrastructure, exposing network features to engineers, enabling them to spin up in a matter of hours.
That work indeed takes years and millions of USD. At Gigs.com, we're doing just that. Building Stripe for telecom. We believe that by giving the best technology companies in the world access to connectivity, we will finally start seeing a lot of innovation in the space, after 3 decades of stagnation.
kjellsbells•6mo ago
- IN - the "intelligent network"
- AIN - the advanced intelligent network
- SIP/SDP app servers
- JAIN app servers
- 4G SCEF (service capability exposure)
- 5G NEF (network exposure)
- 5G AF (application function)
- CAMARA
I've probably omitted half a dozen more.
My diagnosis is that the telcos have nothing that developers want and plenty that they don't want. For example, no one is crying out for low level access to the 5G network slicing function and they're definitely not in a hurry to tie their ability to make money to whether they can integrate with some telco's billing system.
Often times a telco will throw up a slide that has, say, a picture of a robot or car using some nifty feature of the 5G network -predictable latency, say- and suggest that developers could use the network for these types of applications. Do you imagine that a FANUC or a Tesla would seriously tie their fortunes to whether some AT&T person would let them get a few bytes across the network? Practically, no way.
There is a demand from developers for telco services, but it is at the level of making API calls to send SMS or make calls. Twilio made good money out of it while the telcos were not looking, or perhaps less charitably, while they were so tied up in whether this SIP header or Diameter PDU should be allowed into their hallowed network that they didnt realize that the world had passed them by.
ipdashc•6mo ago
With the exception of SIP, I have no idea how I'd learn or demo any of the things you mentioned as a random developer. Even if my company asked me to. My immediate assumption would be that you need to be a fellow telco or a multi-million dollar customer to get any kind of access to this stuff. And that setting up a lab of your own to play around with requires pouring though thousands of pages of obtuse standards and documentation to make any sense of it, not to mention the radio hardware if you want to actually interface with modems?
It's a shame, because telecom seems very cool, but I just have no idea where you'd even start.
p_l•6mo ago
It's just that we're in a bubble that does not intersect with that bubble, and a lot of the stuff became less important with always on IP connectivity and big screen smartphones with local applications and a web browser.
Some of the mentioned technologies are also used explicitly to build the actual network, especially combined with the long legacy tail involved
antonvs•6mo ago
They also benefit from regulatory capture - the CTO where I was used to spend a lot of time in DC. Competing on tech capabilities is just not what they do.
Sure, operators upgrade their networks from 3G to 4G to 5G, but they're not the ones driving that innovation, they're just deploying stuff developed at other companies like Qualcomm and Ericsson.
throwaway-blaze•6mo ago
Telcos are cash-flow businesses. They borrow billions with bond sales to fund spectrum acquisition and hardware / network deployment, then optimize payback and profit by taking $80-$200 per account per month from millions of people.
There are smart, forward looking people inside these companies who want to build for 3rd party devs. And they might even get the dispensation from some SVP to start working on an offering, and occasionally one of those makes it out the door to real developers. But ultimately, it isn't a priority for the C-suite, and when that SVP moves off to some other group or company, there's no more sponsorship for the "innovation".
As long as they take in billions reselling Apple/Samsung hardware connecting to Ericsson / Nokia hardware, they're not focusing on anything else.