API Evangelist Conversation with Henry Calvert, Global Head of Future Networks @ GSMA

Hello again, Kin Lane, the API Evangelist, here for another one of my API Evangelist conversations where I bring in interesting folks who are doing really cool things with APIs. Let’s not waste any time, let’s dive right in and see who we have. Hello, who are you?

Hi, Kin, hi everyone. My name is Henry Calvert, I’m head of networks at the GSMA. I’m also the industry lead for a little initiative we’re doing across the mobile industry, which is called Open Gateway.

So I want to dive into Open Gateway. Give me the history. How did it come to be, what’s it doing?

Well, let’s face facts, Kin, at the start here, this is not the first time the mobile industry has tried to expose its network capabilities for APIs. We’ve had some moderate successes, like Mobile Connect, and we’ve had some spectacular, sorry, spectacular failures, like OneAPI. So it’s not the first time, this is not our first rodeo in these activities. And what we’ve evangelized over the last 18 months, two years now, since 2022, is to actually refocus on how we should expose network capabilities and the data context that mobile network operators have to developers in a very simple form, just like the cloud hyperscalers do, they provide store and compute that is programmable. We want to actually make our mobile networks in the industry programmable as well, so it’s really easy for developers to start using some of the cool stuff that is coming out of 5G network generations.

Yeah, I poked around the APIs, and from a technical perspective you guys seem to have kind of got your finger on the pulse of what developers are needing. I can find things on GitHub, OpenAPI specs, like all the things that are there. So was reaching developers, kind of coming down to the modern developer level, a big part of this initiative?

Yeah, we just decided in the GSMA, and this is an industry-wide activity and I’ll mention that in a minute, but we decided in the GSMA, let’s stop doing specifications by documentation, let’s start doing it by code. And the best place for code that we feel is GitHub, which is the best place for it because people are very familiar with it in the IT and developer world. So let’s use that as the form of communications. There’s also, it gets a little bit more complicated as we build out the industry with channel partners, there’s operate-based APIs that are exposed through the TM Forum, they have their ODA architecture, and that is actually providing some of the fulfillment activities you need to onboard developers, onboard applications, and look at the performance of what’s actually been provided from the mobile networks and the applications themselves. That’s still in a very young state of what’s actually happening. And also in the GSMA we have a GitHub repository ourselves where we’re looking at the interoperability, where aggregators have aggregated operator exposure of APIs, how the routing and how each of those networks can be interoperable between each other. So we’ve kind of got a good grip now of the framework that we need to actually get in place over the last 18 months.

So you touch on my audience very well, because I do APIs, I speak to developers, these are very technical things, and developers are picky, finicky, and want things a certain way, and you nailed that. Now the other end of my audience is kind of the executive leaders, industry leaders, top of the pyramid, and I focus on the technology, the intersection of the technology, the business, and the politics of APIs. And so how are you addressing the similar concerns and making sure that the Open Gateway is kind of speaking to leadership, business leadership, and industry leaders?

Well, there’s two fundamental things that also the GSMA brings, and that is, first of all, the commercial principles by which the APIs can be commercialized or the access can be commercialized over the long time. So monetizing the assets that we have from the operators, and we’re starting to display that as we get into commercial launches of the APIs. We’re starting to actually bring them to life through use cases and case studies of how they impact not only the customer experience but the quality people are getting. So we can mention a few of those use cases. Anti-fraud is the big one at this point in time. How are we reducing fraud out there, how are we reducing phishing, how are we reducing, I think it’s called authorized push payments, which is sort of when people are tricked into moving cash around? How are we looking at the network characteristics to really stop those frauds actually happening? But we want to jump out of that and also talk about how do we actually provide better, reliable networks through APIs, like quality on demand, or how do we actually get closer to the customer using the edge site discovery API, how do you understand where the next store and compute resources are closer to the end customer at the end of the day? So that’s really sort of evangelizing how the value can be created in the industry and drive that forward from a supply side. The other sort of aspect we need to be very conscious of is regulation. Privacy and consent is a really important topic, and if we can get privacy and consent right, and I think we can, we open up from legitimate use of APIs to actually a conversation with the endpoints, which would be the mobile users or the endpoints at the end of Wi-Fi routers, for the use of their information. Obviously, giving that consent and managing that consent is very important in doing that. So on the supply side there, Kin, we’re starting to actually explain that to executives, and they’re sort of saying, right, okay, there’s going to be a trusted environment by which I can actually do business, and there’s going to be value that we’re actually creating from that. But we’re not stopping there either, Kin, sorry for taking so long on this bit, we’re actually starting to look at the demand side. So I’ve created a small team that is actually starting to ask enterprises and developers, what do you need from a network, what are your pain points, what are your challenges, and really get them to have a voice at the table. Now we’re starting off with fairly large multinational corporations, because that’s the GSMA, we’re trying to actually get ubiquity, not only in local markets but regionally and globally. Think of car manufacturers, think of Toyota, Toyota operates in every market, Airbus lands planes in every market, they want the same way to connect to networks as they would in their own local market, and that’s what this APIs and the standardization of these APIs is bringing. But at this point in time it’s really what the operators have been sort of discovering over the last 10 years, like SIM swap, device location, or number verification, or quality on demand, or, as I mentioned before, edge site discovery, it’s sort of Telco supply-side APIs. We’ve got to find out from the enterprises what they need in their connections, what information do they need, like population density, and branching out to other APIs that these enterprises need to actually use and that they actually demand.

Yeah, I mean, it feels like you guys are really reflecting wider, where I would say DNS, API gateways, moving to the edge, but you guys seem to be approaching it from a very business as well as regulatory as well as technical. I mean, the edge a lot of times is also data sovereignty, and like knowing your audience, it’s local as well, it’s not just the business and technical, it’s actually what company or country are we operating in. So would you say you’re accommodating both the technical and the business and kind of regulatory side of that with this new release?

For sure, for sure, and everything that actually means in the different regulations in the market. That’s where the GSMA can actually assist the industry in this, because we have looked at that regulation and the differences in each of the marketplaces, and we have a single principle, the law in the market that is where the customer is is the law that needs to be applied, but also the law where that customer actually resides, i.e. where they bought their service from, their nationality, etc. This is very important when customers are roaming and they’re in different networks, and it does get quite complicated, but we’ve been able to manage voice calls and SMSs and be able to produce data services, a lot of them have been home-routed, but now we’re trying to actually have local breakout. What that means is, if you’re traveling, Kin, from the USA to the United Kingdom, your services and your internet doesn’t travel all the way back to the USA and you get long delays, it actually breaks out in the UK, and we can start using these APIs and capabilities to know where people are, so we can inform the enterprises so they understand what regulatory regime they need to work under and how to apply that.

I got into the API game in 2010 because I saw that what was powering this new wave of mobile devices was APIs, and you couldn’t see them, they’re not visible, and I felt like early net neutrality discussions and all these arguments that we were having were woefully uninformed because you couldn’t see what was actually going on in these spaces. So do you feel like the Gateway and your standards are going to help make that visible so we can actually have a real conversation about things now?

For sure, for sure, and I think we’ve started to look at the practices of device location just recently, that seems to be, let’s go for the one that sort of is discussed quite a lot, and that is device location at the moment, location and privacy. This sort of consent model that we’re actually bringing in gives us many different options, whether it’s a real-time consent request from the consumer, and the guidelines by which, what is a consistent UX by which you can take that subscriber and that customer through, so you actually understand the steps. So we’re starting to build those principles into that consent model, and therefore device location and the concerns that local regulators have about using someone’s location can be met in some form, and most importantly can be recorded as well when it’s actually been done, and interrogated from that.

Yeah, that’s huge, and you guys’s approach to consent, know your consumer, a lot of these anti-fraud and kind of making things visible, and then you mentioned TM Forum. Do you feel like there’s kind of an intersection or a crosswalk, multiple standards and industries, because it feels like banking and payment can lean on a lot of what you’re doing, it feels like it really goes across industry?

They are, and what’s been sort of groundbreaking for us is there seems to be a desire to collaborate across the industry sectors. So Linux is doing the CAMARA APIs, TM Forum’s doing the operate APIs, and the GSMA is doing the interoperability and sort of the business evangelization of it, and we’re kind of very much working in harmony. And certainly in my life of 10 years of GSMA, you know, we’ve been in a couple of decades of competition around who’s doing what, but it really does feel like the industry is at this crossroads where we’re saying we actually need to fix these problems, because we’re just annoying developers that they can’t get access, and we can see the frustration, and at this point in time we’re actually starting to drive that through and make those changes.

Yeah, it’s so important. It feels like, I’ve done a lot of studying of early electrical, electricity industry and the regulation that came and ended up with a much bigger pie once things standardized and everyone stopped competing on doing it themselves and doing their own voltage and their own power lines and having some shared standards. It’s not just about government oversight, it’s actually about harmonizing and working across people or industries. So one last question for you. What interests you about this, what keeps you coming back and doing this at GSMA for so long?

I think, for me personally, I think that mobile has changed consumer life, okay, for the last two decades, our lives are so different. I think mobile on balance has provided huge social benefit in what’s actually happening, it’s enabled people to do more. We have to actually ensure that that is done in a correct fashion, all right, making sure that there’s not too much of an issue. I mean, making sure that mobile phones aren’t utilized too often, especially with the younger generations, and we’ve got to learn to actually make sure that people use these devices appropriately and properly. That said, and I’ve been through, I’m that old now, Kin, I’ve been through all the generations, 2G, 3G, 4G, and we’re at 5G, and 5G is the enterprise, it’s meant to be delivering enterprise benefit, enterprise productivity, that’s going to actually make sure logistics go quicker, make sure that our lives aren’t complicated. How long do we spend on the phone talking to banks about unraveling sort of the systems of the fraud protection they put in place, and they need to put them in place, but we can make that a better place with the banks and with the enterprises, it’d be better. You know, even these IoT things that go out there, about the parking sensors, knowing where I can park and when can I park and when the different levels are full, getting all this information up onto the consumer-facing is good, and we just haven’t quite fired there yet in 5G enterprise. It’s coming, but it’s just not there. And this is, to me, the last piece of the puzzle of a two-sided business model, B2B to C, or B to C, in the activities that need to be done. And there are great technologies out there in 5G, there’s 5G Advanced, which are better uplinks, which means in practice that you can stream video from your mobile phones to content service a lot better, and that’s really great in security, video security, and also robotics, where they’re actually measuring where container bases are and things like that. So the 5G is there. There’s a fundamental shift we’ve done in 5G, which is a service-based architecture, so it’s not appliance boxes anymore that operators buy, it’s software functions that they’re deploying in a DevOps fashion. We’re in this transition, and if we can get that, then enterprises themselves can start to deploy their own private networks, and we can start to better integrate through NTN with satellite industries. So even when I look at the generational change, I need a Gateway by which the enterprise can actually talk to the telecommunications networks. We need the language, we need the Babel Fish of life, and I see APIs, APIs are the only way that these are going to happen. So I want to finish my career in the fact of ensuring that enterprises are really using mobile networks to their fullest capability, so consumers can have a better life at the end of the day.

Dig it. I love having, I’m glad you’re fighting this fight and doing it, paying attention to this layer, and you have an eye for the business, because I think convincing business leadership of APIs and standardization and gateways like you guys see a Gateway being is really critical. So I appreciate you coming by and sharing today, Henry.

No problem, thank you very much, Kin, thank you everyone on the call.

All right, thanks a lot. All right, very cool. I love the business and the standardization side. This is definitely a modern look at the Gateway, and I think very slick in how they’re approaching this from a kind of global aspect. So several stories here just on the Gateway, you know, stay tuned for, on the blog, the Gateway, but I think the intersection with TM Forum and CAMARA, and as well as some of the consent and the privacy and anti-fraud and kind of edge stuff. So I think there’s going to be three or four stories coming out of this conversation. I appreciate everyone coming by today, thanks.