As Telco Cloud Rapidly Evolves With 5G Acceleration, Linux Foundation Announces Telco Global API Alliance Project CAMARA in Barcelona

By Arti Loftus, Special Correspondent  |  February 28, 2022

According to industry experts, the global Telecom API market will continue to grow rapidly, growing from US $22 billion in 2021 to $84 billion by 2028, with a stunning CAGR of over 20% (this according to “Global Telecom API Market, 2022-2028” published by Proficient Market Insights.

The world’s largest real-time communications companies, from Verizon and AT&T based in the US, to China Mobile (News - Alert), China Telecom, KDDI, NTT DOCOMO, SK Telecom, Bharti Airtel, and Softbank in Asia, to Deutsche Telekom AG, Telefonica, Vodafone, Orange and many more in EMEA, and America Movil and others in LatAm are hiring in-house developers and working with disruptive platform developers to participate in the “API Economy” that started to build around ten years ago.

For many years, APIs have played a very important role in developing mobile applications, and with the advent of 5G hyper-fast wireless communications, analysts agree that the potential of new applications, in categories including SMS, MMS, and RCS, webRTC, payment APIs, voice APIs, maps & location APIs, identity management APIs, and many others is unlimited.

As one of the largest, far-reaching, and forward-thinking non-profit technology standards and frameworks organizations, the Linux Foundation (News - Alert) has been active and influential in the Telco API world, and this week at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona announced “CAMARA - The Telco Global API Alliance” which brings together ecosystem players to address industry API interoperability leveraging GSMA OPG requirements and leverage Linux Foundation’s existing, massive Developer Ecosystem.

Coming together with the GSMA, a global industry organization that is unifying the mobile ecosystem to discover, develop and deliver innovation foundational to positive business environments and societal change, this new global partnership will address challenges in porting and reproducing API services across heterogeneous operator and cloud architectures.

CAMARA will help customer and developer ecosystems by developing an open, global, and accessible API solution with access to operator capabilities, whichever networks customers are in, allowing applications to run consistently between telco networks and different countries.

In addition, CAMARA offers new opportunities for collaboration between network and cloud players to address the challenges of porting and reproducing API services across heterogeneous operator architectures.

Their mission is to address the fragmentation of telco and cloud developers to enable faster, more versatile advancement of global portability and broad industry adoption of new features and capabilities.

A close collaboration has been set up between the CAMARA project and the GSMA’s Operator Platform initiative that is defining a federated platform solution for exposing operator network capabilities to external applications. This collaboration will ensure that developers relying on the CAMARA project’s API solution and abstraction will facilitate users across operator networks.

“We are thrilled to enter into this next chapter of collaboration with the GSMA,” said Arpit Joshipura (News - Alert), general manager, Networking, Edge and IoT, the Linux Foundation. “By harnessing existing open source communities within CNCF, LF Networking, LF Edge and aligning to GSMA’s OPG industry requirements, we are poised to address current challenges in API accessibility.”

“The Operator Platform initiative welcomes new members to join more than 40 leading operators and 35 ecosystem partners, already working together on requirements and APIs. This type of collaboration with CAMARA is essential in accelerating scale to meet today’s integration demands,” said Henry Calvert, Head of Networks, GSMA. “We are very pleased to be working with Linux Foundation and our membership on developing reliability and resilience in APIs and simplifying challenges for our developer communities.”

CAMARA is supported by leading industry organizations, including AT&T (News - Alert), Capgemini, Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson, GSMA, IBM, Google Cloud, Kandy, KDDI, Microsoft, MobiledgeX, Nokia, Orange, NGNM, Scenera, T-Mobile US, TIM, Telefonica, TELUS, The Linux Foundation, and Vodafone (News - Alert).

More details about the GSMA’s Operator Platform initiative (and its closely related Telco Edge Cloud activity) can be found at https://www.gsma.com/operatorplatform.

Learn more about CAMARA during MWC Barcelona in keynote session of: https://www.mwcbarcelona.com/agenda/session/cloud-edge-a-new-approach-to-innovation

More details about “CAMARA - The Telco Global API Alliance” are also available via GitHub: https://github.com/camaraproject.


Arti Loftus is an experienced Information Technology specialist with a demonstrated history of working in the research, writing, and editing industry with many published articles under her belt.

Edited by Luke Bellos
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