Telcos are just not set up to produce a usable developer platform. Too many perverse incentives, politics and conflicts of interest, internally.
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.
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.