Ericsson at the coal face with network APIs

Executive analyst at neXt Curve and 5G API apostle Leonard Lee told Silverlinings that he agreed with Ericsson’s CEO comments on their latest earnings call about how long it would take to derive meaningful revenues from 5G network APIs.

“Meaningful API revenue in a 2025 timeframe is a reasonable expectation,” Lee agreed. “It takes time to build these frameworks and the services.”

You don’t need all pieces in place right away though to deliver limited API-derived services, Lee commented, as Ericsson CEO Börje Ekholm noted yesterday. “There are cross-network solutions I feel Ericsson and others can start to pursue without waiting for the entire community or the standards to gel,” Lee said.

Ekholm said on the company’s earnings call that he expected to gain “limited revenues” from APIs in 2023. “There is a change in the market now when we are discussing network APIs with all our customers today, and all of them see this as a major opportunity to monetize the network and the investments in 5G,” the Ericsson boss noted.

“It is important to understand that these network APIs expose non-functional capabilities, so it is likely that these services will be bound to an app service, meaning from an end user perspective they experience augmented performance, reliability, availability, and portability across underlying networks in some fashion and mix,” Lee said.

“With Vonage and the Global Network Platform (GNP), Ericsson has a head start. If they can identify the critical cross-network problems to solve, developers, enterprises and operators will likely find value in engaging and developing on Ericsson’s platforms,” the analyst concluded.