Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:05):
So we're at the Linux Foundation's Open Networking and Edge Summit in London. I'm here with Nathan Rader. He is VP of Service and Capability Exposure at Deutsche Telekom and chair of the Governing body of the CAMARA Project. So Nathan, great to see you again. Thanks for joining us. Thanks, Ray.

Nathan Rader, Deutsche Telekom (00:20):
Nice to be here.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:22):
So CAMARA is a name that many in the industry will now be familiar with, but can you just give us an overview of what CAMARA is all about and more importantly, where it is?

Nathan Rader, Deutsche Telekom (00:32):
Yeah, so I think where it is, we initially launched CAMARA in 2023, I believe, at MWC in Barcelona as a very small project or an idea, really more than a project. It's grown quite a bit since then, but it's really, I think starting to get some traction. It's designed to do really two very small and very simple things. It's looking to take and make a quasi standard. I'm not going to call it a standard because doing things in open source is not a standards body. So it's not really a standard, but it's trying to act like a standard so that we can have a common set of API parameters or products that are different or the same between different networks. And then the second thing is trying to do is really simplify things because every Telcos network is made up of a different combination of vendors, a different kind of configuration and implementation.

(01:37):
And so we don't know, or developers don't know what they need from the network, so they can't just make an API call and have it be the same API call to every telco. So we need to really take and simplify that down, make it parameters that are easy and simple for developers to understand, to get access to, and then they can easily make a call to the network and let the network decide. And so the CAMARA project itself is designed to define that simple standard towards the developer, but then allow the telcos or the CSPs themselves to take that standard and do all the complex stuff in the background and sort it out down into their network. So that's really where it's headed.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (02:19):
And where is CAMARA at the moment in terms of the number of network APIs that are

Nathan Rader, Deutsche Telekom (02:24):
Available? Oh my, I'm going to probably get in trouble here because we're doing the launch. I think the press release goes out today with the new number. I don't remember exactly what it is. I want to say it's 36 or 37. It may be 41,

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (02:38):
Let's say more than 35 when

Nathan Rader, Deutsche Telekom (02:40):
It's a lot. So we do have quite a few APIs that are now being released as part of our meta release. I think we have approximately 300 or participants from 300 or so different companies participating, or at least have signed up and are attending meetings and things, and probably over a thousand people in the community on the mailing list and getting things. So the development has quite a bit picked up since the early days.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (03:12):
And where is the mobile operate community right now in terms of the adoption of these APIs?

Nathan Rader, Deutsche Telekom (03:18):
Yeah, that's always the challenge.

(03:21):
So the GSMA has been doing a great job with supporting with their open gateway project that is trying to drive that amongst its community members. So we've got APIs, CAMARA, APIs popping up all over in networks. The challenge is, is they're still sort of uncoordinated, so they're popping up here. There maybe some countries have done a better job of coordinating amongst themselves, but of course we run into a few challenges like antitrust and being able to share with competitors in the network exactly what you're working on. So we're trying to find forums that we can collaborate, we can work together still being in compliant way, but making these APIs available. So I think that we're seeing a fairly good uptake of APIs across quite a few operators. They're just not coordinated yet. It's a little bit of a scattered approach at this point in time, but it's starting to kind of come together.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (04:20):
I mean, there's activity all over the world, isn't there? Latin America, Europe, quite a few.

Nathan Rader, Deutsche Telekom (04:25):
Yeah, it's good activity. So when we originally started this project and had the idea of kicking it off, our CTO said, okay to me, he said, Nathan, what is the definition of success of CAMARA? And I said, well, actually to me, I'll deem it a success when I finally have somebody pitching it to me and telling me what CAMARA is and instead of the other way around. And that's actually starting to happen a lot more often these days where somebody comes up to me and is actually telling me that they've got a Kmar API do you know what a kmar API is? Let me tell you about it. So I think, yeah, we're really starting to see the traction there.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (05:04):
Okay. Now, Deutsch telecoms being exploring the potential of network APIs for a few years already and has gone through a few iterations of its approach to the industry. What's the strategy in the Deutsche Telecom group with regards to the adoption of CAMARA APIs?

Nathan Rader, Deutsche Telekom (05:25):
So first we're starting in Germany and we're starting in the us. Those are our two biggest markets. We're making those available. We're building out a common exposure platform because that is one of the things that we need to have. We need to have a platform that takes those APIs and does that CAMARA transformation translation in the background. We've got, at this point, I think six or seven of the Kumar APIs actually in DTS network available for use by customers making money on some of them. It's still early days because it's not huge money, particularly because we still are hearing the same thing. Most developers are looking for either the full market coverage, so all of Germany or they're even looking bigger for I need all of Europe or certain parts. So we're in a chicken and egg situation right now, a little bit where we still need to get the other operators kind of on board with the same APIs and made available. And then also ensuring that there's a common exposure for all of those. We're now starting to move into our other parts of Europe footprint outside of Germany. So we're starting to look at making some of the first APIs available there. And again, the same reason. We want to make sure that they're coordinated with our German footprint and having the same APIs available because that's what's going to start really driving the adoption.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (06:51):
Okay. Now you mentioned that chicken and egg situation there. It's all about getting not exposure of the network, but exposure to the developer community of what is going on and what the potential is in the telecom sector. Now, Deutsche Telecom was one of the founding members of adona. What role is that playing in helping to get that message out and making it easier for everybody in the ecosystem to get on board with this?

Nathan Rader, Deutsche Telekom (07:24):
So we worked quite a bit to get this idea of aduna out because of exactly the need for that common solution. We needed to have, as I said, ubiquitous coverage of the footprint. And in Germany, that would mean, of course Telefonica. That would mean Vodafone. And so the idea was to take and have a douna as a commercial entity because its goal would then be to drive real business. So not to act as any sort of an alliance or standards body or something where we drive things by consensus. This was very much to have an independent team building out there incentivized to drive and do business and get those connections up and running. So with Adona, we're really hoping that that starts to start filling those gaps to have a place where all the CSPs have somebody can talk to that helps us solve some of the problems we have around with antitrust and aligning roadmaps because now we have an independent trusted third party that we're actually doing that now. It's then able to take those APIs, aggregate them together into a common singular endpoint and offer that singular endpoint out to channels that can then sell it further on. And that allows these developers to really have what they want to. They don't have to stall contracts with 200 different telcos and try to figure out how that works.

(08:50):
They don't have to actually even contact us as a telco. They have one point they contact, they get it. It works. It solves a lot of the compliance and regulatory issues that are unique to each and every country and really drive it forward. And once that gets going, because still in the process of just getting it closed up here, we believe that that will solve that chicken and egg kind of bush going forward.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (09:16):
At a broader level, the adoption of these CAMARA network APIs, what does that mean for service development for the mobile operators as well, and also the revenue potential? You mentioned there that Deutsche Telecom starting to see some early signs of revenue generation from this. What could it mean in the coming years for mobile operators?

Nathan Rader, Deutsche Telekom (09:40):
Yeah, I think it's going to still be fairly slow to start with. I don't think that we should jump on and say that it's going to be this huge amount of money because it really won't be until we get scale. But I think that everything we start doing really starts to reiterate over and over the reason that we're doing this. And of course, as you make access or create access to more valuable assets in the network, of course we can then price them accordingly. A lot of these early APIs are very simple, just information calls and I'll, granted that information is quite important, but I think once we get to the point where we can start offering quality on demand or QOS or some of these more advanced capabilities, that's really where we'll start seeing the drive. But of course, that has a lot more technical enablement that needs to be done down in the network that maybe not everybody is ready to jump into right now.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (10:35):
Are there specific verticals that are the low hanging fruit, if you like, for the applications that might be developed here? It seemed that finance was one that cropped up early.

Nathan Rader, Deutsche Telekom (10:48):
Yeah, finance seems to pop up a lot. I mean, I think a lot of the early use cases are things like authentication with your phone number. That of course is almost across verticals. I think that, again, we'll see probably banking as an early start because that is very country specific. You don't have to have this global ubiquitous coverage. Whereas if you think about using your phone number to log into Uber, for instance, Uber is going to want to have a fairly broad reach before they really jump into it. Whereas the banks in Germany, we need three people or three operators to make that really work. So that's where I do think that finance will be some of the early ones. Automotive is probably a little further out because again, you have crossing borders than the challenges there. Some of those use cases. Manufacturing again is probably a fairly early one, but in the end, I think that the way I look at is it's really going to be up to the developers.

(11:55):
It's really what's going to happen. I don't really know. I think there's a lot of capabilities in our network that can be exposed and can have something done with it. I sort of relate this to sort of the early days of the app stores in a sense, you had a phone, you had just at that point in time, faster connectivity, and all of a sudden you had all these apps being created. Well, we're sort of in that same stage now. You've got a bunch of APIs here, don't know exactly what developers will do with it. But I think there's going to be all kinds of interesting things in the future that developers are going to be able to do, jump on and drive forward. And that's what I'm really excited to see.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (12:29):
Excellent. Well, we're excited to see it as well and look forward to how this is going to develop in the coming years and look forward to chatting with you about it again later in 2025.

Nathan Rader, Deutsche Telekom (12:40):
Absolutely. It sounds great.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (12:42):
Okay, good to see you, Nathan.

Nathan Rader, Deutsche Telekom (12:43):
Thanks Ray. Appreciate it.