The Ecosystem for Open Gateway NaaS API Development

Together, CAMARA, the GSMA, LF Networking and TM Forum have written a white paper to introduce some of the concepts of a GSMA Open Gateway NaaS architecture and to shed light on the intended demarcation points, so that stakeholders can know the scope and touchpoints of the participating organizations and understand how each of them contribute.

GSMA Open Gateway is a framework of common network Application Programmable Interfaces (APIs) designed to provide universal access to operator networks for developers. With the support of 25 mobile network operators, GSMA Open Gateway helps application developers enhance and deploy services more quickly across operator networks via single points of access to the world’s largest connectivity platform.

Network as a Service (NaaS) represents a paradigm shift with great impact on the industry landscape. Its development requires a collaborative workspace that brings together incumbent telco standards bodies with IT and cloud communities, industry associations and open-source projects. An effective collaboration among organizations needs to be based on a clear demarcation on their scope of work, avoiding that participating organizations run overlapping activities or duplicate efforts; otherwise, NaaS may risk ending up with a fragmented ecosystem. CSPs and vendors must support and adhere to the outcome produced by these bodies, and ensure their internal teams are aligned.

On the publication of the whitepaper, George Glass, CTO at TM Forum, commented “The combination of being able to get access to previously unavailable network services in combination with service and management APIs from TM Forum creates exciting new opportunities for developers to combine these sets of easy-to-use APIs to build hybrid IT and network services into new product offerings.” He added, “Our Catalyst project, 5G Enablement through industry standardized APIs, is working on enabling application developers to create innovative Metarverse journeys by exposing a unified set of APIs to realize CSPs’ 5G capabilities.”

Learn more about the findings of the Catalyst project here: IG1318 TM Forum and CAMARA APIs for telco standardized service exposure v1.0.0