It’s the early summer conference season, when Camara like OneAPI did in the past, gather the old-boys to sing from the same hymn sheet. Telecom APIs are a high data topic, we should focus on facts not belief.
For those that do not know me, I’ve run TADHack since 2014, the largest, longest running hackathon focused on programmable telecoms. Telecom APIs if you prefer, but that term is now self-limiting.
This year we have vCon TADHack and Telnyx TADHack, come join in and hack, you do not need to be a developer. I’ve been in the programmable telecoms space for many decades, founding and selling a company, and helping many entrepreneurs over the years. I have seen telcos repeated attempts. I helped Telefonica’s BlueVia get closer than most, until it was closed down like O2 has done many times before.
Virtually all the innovators in programmable communications have sponsored TADHack and TADSummit (founded in 2013, and still running). Nexmo sponsored TADHack in 2014, once it was bought by Vonage (a telco) it did not.
This has always been the challenge for Vonage, a telco exec team, and dev-centric operations for part of its business (also has UCaaS, CCaaS, and VoIP (telco)). I explained back in 2021 Ericsson’s mistake in buying Vonage. Its write-downs and shareholder anger proved I was correct <sad sigh>.
Over 10 years ago I pointed out OneAPI was a mistake, and to follow the path of Twilio and its ilk. However, the old-boys network that includes the GSMA and its catamites think they understand the Web and developers, so had another go with Camara, and are repeating history <apathetic sigh>.
Camara like OneAPI pay consultants to deliver the analysis they want. You know the type, repeating marketing as fact, and deriving towers of assumptions based on first principles, with no practical experience. Yes, Telecom APIs remain a mess from the telecoms side, but from the web side it’s beautiful, see what OpenAI and Jambonz are doing <joyful sigh>.
My recommendations:
1) Listen to Geoff Hollingworth on customer focus AND understand your existing competitors. The list is long, their APIs are faster than Camara, a fraction of the cost, are often good enough (like 4G), from strategic suppliers that have listened to their customers (banks) for decades, and originate from the IP domain.
2) Check out wholesale programmable telecoms from TelecomsXchange, in fact, check out all the innovators in that article. Yes, a small company, and they use open source (like Amazon, Google, Microsoft), but that does not matter in 2025. Delivering value to your customers is what matters. Not pointless API standards your customers do not care about.
3) See the list of issues with some industry bodies in telecoms, it’s a swamp of corporate arrogance, serial crooks, and abusers. Just ignore them, you’ll not build a successful business listening to them, you’ll just spend even more money with their sponsors for little return.
