Why carriers can’t create common APIs (but need to keep trying)

The Wholesale Application Community (WAC) will go down in mobile history as one of the most ambitious, but failed, attempts at collaboration by our dear telco friends. Locaid’s CEO Rip Gerber explains why these powerful carriers — all facing common threats — couldn’t get their WAC together.

Over the past two decades, I’ve built and sold a few companies that have exploited the simple fact that the bigger an industry behemoth grows, the harder it gets for it to serve its customers. At my last company, Intellisync, my teams built products that wireless carriers needed but couldn’t deliver. Today, I run Locaid, a company that simply ?lls a void between giant carriers and giant enterprise developers. It’s hard enough for a single giant to innovate, so why do they always assume a coalition of giants will fare better? They never do.

Coalitions seldom succeed unless the members are motivated by a supreme crisis. Throughout history, a major threat or act of war was often needed to compel independent and competing parties to join forces for common gain: the United States, NATO, the international ban on whaling. Business can be war too, but the stakes aren’t usually high enough to keep a collective of companies aligned under a common agenda. Except for OPEC or Hollywood agencies, coalitions tend to generate more fodder for the press than progress.

Last week, another coalition tombstone was etched. As Kevin Fitchard explained (and eerily predicted) in his recent article: the Wholesale Application Community (WAC) will go down in mobile history as one of the most ambitious, but failed, collaboration attempts of our dear telco friends.

WAC, if you don’t know, was an industry alliance of 47 of the largest worldwide mobile operators. It was formed in 2010 to help wireless carriers compete in an open, unwalled mobile world. Rather than force developers to work with each individual operator to get APIs, the carriers would design a “single API” for location, billing, messaging and more. This would be the “iTunes for carrier stuff.”

Why couldn’t these powerful carriers — all facing common threats from open, data rich, ubiquitous platforms such as Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon — get their WAC together?

Membership impatience. Collectively, the carriers endeavored for more than two years to launch a “single API,” and failed to develop much of anything. Now the carriers are individually frustrated with the GSMA and WAC. Rightly so. You won’t find the AT&T and Verizon chief technology officers publicly bashing the GSMA. But within their carrier walls, you can hear their screams at LTE and 4G speed. Don’t be surprised if splinter groups of carriers leave the WAC’s original 47 members behind to form their own common API solutions. And they should. Developers want tools and APIs that are easy and ubiquitous. A group of 47 single-minded designers won’t ever create a slick, friendly interface.

APIs aren’t backhaul. Deploying servers and towers is easy after developing decades of monopolistic experience. But building APIs is hard. Those of us that do it well (such as Apigee, or my company, Locaid) have spent years and tens of millions of patient investor money connecting behemoth, byzantine carrier networks to create easy-to-use APIs for developers. You cannot create an API by committee. And while the carriers have done a yeoman’s job of offering up more APIs – either directly or through partners – for high-demand services such a billing, messaging, location, it’s not an effort conducive to a group. The task is made more difficult for carriers because top developer talent wants Apple, Google or the latest VC-backed wunderkind on their resume — not AT&T or Vodafone. Carriers are trying to attract top developers, but that takes time. “Coding at carrier” isn’t hip in the college dorms just yet.

Policy versus products. Ultimately, WAC was a policy-setting machine, not an execution machine. And it certainly wasn’t a market-making initiative, which is what the carriers all desperately want. Some of us in the API enabler market have more sales people selling carrier API data than all 47 WAC carriers combined. It takes focus, design and execution to win share. And if you can’t launch product, you won’t survive. Hence, RIP WAC.

WAC will be resurrected. The concept of carriers working together comes around every few years. WAC will rise again (under a new brand no doubt). But even if carriers can get their network technology people to agree on standards, code, enablers, SLAs, etc. (good luck with that), and even if the carriers’ legal teams can agree on liability, privacy, etc. (more good luck to them there), they still have a major issue: carriers will have a hard time selling APIs. These are telcos. The sales teams, commission incentives, even the product offers, need to be dramatically restructured to become “developer friendly” services. Carriers can get there, but the journey will take time.

It’s a shame, really. The carriers want what WAC promised, and two-by-two they will eventually get there. WAC and carriers are populated with smart, innovative folks, and they should be admired for their ambition and fight. But carrier machinery — processing billions of bits per second at five nines of reliability — isn’t built to move at developer speed. Not out of the gate.

This is a great opportunity for developers. The message from the market is now loud and clear: “WAC is dead! Long live WAC!” The holy grail of “one API” remains. Venture capitalists and strategic investors have been funding the market-driven API agenda to date, and they will continue to do so because it’s the right thing to do. And it will be up to nimble, focused innovators to fill the need, one API at a time.

Rip Gerber is the founder and CEO of Locaid. The company offers Location-as-a-Service that connects developers to Tier 1 carriers via a single API.

Image courtesy of Flickr user buddawiggi.

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Mobile tweets are breaking Olympics’ TV data – how did carriers prepare?

Irony of ironies – after encouraging fans to tweet copiously, the International Olympic Committee requests London 2012 attendees limit their output only to “urgent” status updates. The problem – mobile updates from some attendees have clogged a mobile network used by official TV data suppliers.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) and Twitter have worked closely in recent weeks to promote the microblog service as a means to engage with athletes, competitions and London 2012. But mobile social media users are proving so voluminous  at some Olympic venues that they are now interfering with mobile networks on which the games themselves depend, the IOC says.

During Olympic cycling road races this weekend, television broadcasters say they were let down by a lack of official timing data supplied by the Olympic Broadcasting Service (OBS). One BBC commentator relied on his own stopwatch.

IOC communications director said (via Guardian.co.uk): “From my understanding, one network was oversubscribed, and OBS are trying to spread the load to other providers.”

Adams did not name the underperforming network. And his plea to tweeters, in the circumstances, goes against the social media project the IOC had tried to create: “We don’t want to stop people engaging in this by social media and sending updates, but perhaps they might consider only sending urgent updates.”

What constitutes an “urgent” Olympic tweet is anyone’s guess. But the request is ironic in light of the IOC’s own social media commitment. That Twitter has undone coverage in this way is even more delightfully ironic for those onlookers who enjoy comparing the relative fortunes of each medium. Unlike the TV data issue, consumers do not yet appear to have experienced mobile signal issues during the games.

The UK’s five main mobile carriers had banded together with the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games (LOCOG) to plan out 3G signal requirements around London well in advance.

“The demands that will be placed on the networks will be like having four royal weddings per day for 17 consecutive days,” Stuart Newstead, chair of the Mobile Experience Group, which represents TV and internet broadcasters and mobile networks at the games, told Bloomberg. “Like any of the athletes, we’ve prepared as well as we could and whatever happens, happens.”

Before the games began, I asked each network their plans to guarantee sufficient coverage – here’s what they said…

Everything Everywhere (Orange and T-Mobile):

“We’ve been preparing for London 2012 since before Orange and T-Mobile merged to become Everything Everywhere (mid-2010), investing millions of pounds to ensure a good experience for both British and international visitors to the Olympics…

“Our network specialists have looked to previous global and national events, and analysed sites around the UK where we expect additional demand over the course of the Summer – including tourist attractions, transport hubs and sporting venues, and upgraded hundreds of key sites to cope with additional demand.

“We’ve also increased measures in place to maintain service and operational stability during the games. Additional field maintenance resource in the areas of the country most affected are in place, alongside dedicated incident managers to ensure a very rapid response time to any service-affecting incidents.

“The Joint Operators Olympic Group (JOOG) is also providing as much capacity as possible using external mobile base stations in the Olympic Park to support the number of visitors expected each day. The operators have built 30 sites across the Olympic Park including 14 in-building solutions. At off-park venues, a further 17 temporary sites are being provided to add additional capacity.”

O2:

The company referred us to COO Derek McManus’ September 2011 blog post, in which he said:

“As an industry, we have been planning for over two years and O2 alone has invested £50m in London 2012 – increasing capacity on the current network and building new temporary sites across the country. The mobile industry is expecting to cater for 80 million mobile phone users in 100 different event locations.”

Vodafone:

“We are investing in excess of £1.5 million per day in our network this year and have weighted that investment towards the first half of 2012 in preparation for a busy summer.

“We have accelerated network upgrade and deployment work and are in the process of optimizing our network in London to ensure our customers have a great experience. We are also putting in place extra coverage in public spaces such as Hyde Park and other areas where we know there will be a large number of people.

“We expect to see high demand for all services during the Games as more and more customers use smartphones to access the internet and social network sites. On an average day, we handle upwards of 45TB (terabytes) of data, 90 million calls and 155 million texts. Obviously we are expecting a significant increase on that level of demand, but we are experts in forecasting demand and optimizing our network – in real time – to cope with high usage.

“We have an elite team of engineers dedicated to preparing for special events. Recently, for instance, they ensured that visitors to London were able to call, text, tweet and upload pictures during the Queen’s Jubilee celebrations.

“Meanwhile, our Network Operations Centre (NOC) at our headquarters in Newbury gives us real-time visibility of traffic and enables our team of engineers to dial up capacity when and where we need it. For example, on New Year’s Eve 2011 our network was comfortably handling 12,000 texts a second and we saw well over a million people log on to Facebook, through their phones, in the space of a couple of hours. Volumes of texts were up 25% from the previous year, as was data traffic.

“We’ve also been working with our colleagues in New Zealand and South Africa to take on board the experiences from other recent large-scale worldwide sporting events.”

Three:

“We have worked in partnership with JOOG (Joint Operator Olympic Group) to build additional and dedicated capacity at the Olympic venues in London and across the country. This work has coincided with our on-going network improvement programme both in the capital and UK-wide

“We’ve upgraded sites at around 500 different locations and have also upgraded most of our sites nationally to the very latest and quickest 3G technology (HSPA+). Later this summer, we will move to Dual-Carrier HSDPA equipment, potentially doubling the speed customers can currently get.

“In addition, we have been busy installing Ethernet backhaul across our entire network to ensure that the cables which carry traffic from sites to our core network are not only quicker than ever before, but have more capacity both now and in the future.”

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Why carriers can’t create common APIs (but need to keep trying)

The Wholesale Application Community (WAC) will go down in mobile history as one of the most ambitious, but failed, attempts at collaboration by our dear telco friends. Locaid’s CEO Rip Gerber explains why these powerful carriers — all facing common threats — couldn’t get their WAC together.

Over the past two decades, I’ve built and sold a few companies that have exploited the simple fact that the bigger an industry behemoth grows, the harder it gets for it to serve its customers. At my last company, Intellisync, my teams built products that wireless carriers needed but couldn’t deliver. Today, I run Locaid, a company that simply ?lls a void between giant carriers and giant enterprise developers. It’s hard enough for a single giant to innovate, so why do they always assume a coalition of giants will fare better? They never do.

Coalitions seldom succeed unless the members are motivated by a supreme crisis. Throughout history, a major threat or act of war was often needed to compel independent and competing parties to join forces for common gain: the United States, NATO, the international ban on whaling. Business can be war too, but the stakes aren’t usually high enough to keep a collective of companies aligned under a common agenda. Except for OPEC or Hollywood agencies, coalitions tend to generate more fodder for the press than progress.

Last week, another coalition tombstone was etched. As Kevin Fitchard explained (and eerily predicted) in his recent article: the Wholesale Application Community (WAC) will go down in mobile history as one of the most ambitious, but failed, collaboration attempts of our dear telco friends.

WAC, if you don’t know, was an industry alliance of 47 of the largest worldwide mobile operators. It was formed in 2010 to help wireless carriers compete in an open, unwalled mobile world. Rather than force developers to work with each individual operator to get APIs, the carriers would design a “single API” for location, billing, messaging and more. This would be the “iTunes for carrier stuff.”

Why couldn’t these powerful carriers — all facing common threats from open, data rich, ubiquitous platforms such as Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon — get their WAC together?

Membership impatience. Collectively, the carriers endeavored for more than two years to launch a “single API,” and failed to develop much of anything. Now the carriers are individually frustrated with the GSMA and WAC. Rightly so. You won’t find the AT&T and Verizon chief technology officers publicly bashing the GSMA. But within their carrier walls, you can hear their screams at LTE and 4G speed. Don’t be surprised if splinter groups of carriers leave the WAC’s original 47 members behind to form their own common API solutions. And they should. Developers want tools and APIs that are easy and ubiquitous. A group of 47 single-minded designers won’t ever create a slick, friendly interface.

APIs aren’t backhaul. Deploying servers and towers is easy after developing decades of monopolistic experience. But building APIs is hard. Those of us that do it well (such as Apigee, or my company, Locaid) have spent years and tens of millions of patient investor money connecting behemoth, byzantine carrier networks to create easy-to-use APIs for developers. You cannot create an API by committee. And while the carriers have done a yeoman’s job of offering up more APIs – either directly or through partners – for high-demand services such a billing, messaging, location, it’s not an effort conducive to a group. The task is made more difficult for carriers because top developer talent wants Apple, Google or the latest VC-backed wunderkind on their resume — not AT&T or Vodafone. Carriers are trying to attract top developers, but that takes time. “Coding at carrier” isn’t hip in the college dorms just yet.

Policy versus products. Ultimately, WAC was a policy-setting machine, not an execution machine. And it certainly wasn’t a market-making initiative, which is what the carriers all desperately want. Some of us in the API enabler market have more sales people selling carrier API data than all 47 WAC carriers combined. It takes focus, design and execution to win share. And if you can’t launch product, you won’t survive. Hence, RIP WAC.

WAC will be resurrected. The concept of carriers working together comes around every few years. WAC will rise again (under a new brand no doubt). But even if carriers can get their network technology people to agree on standards, code, enablers, SLAs, etc. (good luck with that), and even if the carriers’ legal teams can agree on liability, privacy, etc. (more good luck to them there), they still have a major issue: carriers will have a hard time selling APIs. These are telcos. The sales teams, commission incentives, even the product offers, need to be dramatically restructured to become “developer friendly” services. Carriers can get there, but the journey will take time.

It’s a shame, really. The carriers want what WAC promised, and two-by-two they will eventually get there. WAC and carriers are populated with smart, innovative folks, and they should be admired for their ambition and fight. But carrier machinery — processing billions of bits per second at five nines of reliability — isn’t built to move at developer speed. Not out of the gate.

This is a great opportunity for developers. The message from the market is now loud and clear: “WAC is dead! Long live WAC!” The holy grail of “one API” remains. Venture capitalists and strategic investors have been funding the market-driven API agenda to date, and they will continue to do so because it’s the right thing to do. And it will be up to nimble, focused innovators to fill the need, one API at a time.

Rip Gerber is the founder and CEO of Locaid. The company offers Location-as-a-Service that connects developers to Tier 1 carriers via a single API.

Image courtesy of Flickr user buddawiggi.

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.