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The GSMA (News - Alert), as part of its OneAPI initiative, has launched a commercial pilot in Canada, working with the country's leading mobile operators Bell Mobility, Rogers Communications and TELUS (News - Alert). It is doing so, in order to showcase the viability and benefits of providing developers with standardised application programming interfaces for mobile networks.

 

The adoption of a common, lightweight and web-friendly set of APIs is being promoted by GSMA, through the OneAPI initiative, to provide application developers with easy access to mobile operator network capabilities.

 

The pilot in Canada marks that using OneAPI, the first time developers are able to gain commercial access to the network assets of multiple operators, from a single gateway, in a consistent and simple way.

 

“A common set of APIs will benefit the entire mobile industry by making it much more attractive for developers to create innovative applications and services by utilizing the capabilities and information provided by operators about their networks,” Michael O'Hara, chief marketing officer at the GSMA, said. “Our OneAPI initiative will help eliminate fragmentation and aid the growth of the mobile applications ecosystem, resulting in a larger addressable market, encouraging innovation, enhancing the customer experience and creating new revenue opportunities for mobile operators and developers alike.”

 

“OneAPI helps wireless providers and developers alike in the overall ecosystem by enabling developers to deliver innovative apps faster to wireless clients across all carriers,” said Nauby Jacob, Bell Mobility's vice president of User Experience and Content.

 

According to Upinder Saini, vice president of New Product Development, Rogers Communications (News - Alert), multiple operating systems, various network interfaces and fragmented technologies make application development far too complex for any developer.

 

“The standardised approach of OneAPI not only reduces these barriers to extend opportunities to the wider developer community, but also equips developers with flexibility, added relevance and significantly reduces time-to-market,” Saini said.

 

“TELUS is proud to bring our network and business capabilities to the GSMA's Canadian OneAPI pilot. We're excited to see how application providers are already taking advantage of the simplicity of OneAPI to create real, mobile-enabled, commercial application and service offerings,” Ibrahim Gedeon (News - Alert), chief technology officer at TELUS, said.

 

“This pilot has demonstrated the value to partners of our ability to abstract our billing and network technology capabilities, including full support for our recently launched national HSPA+ high-speed network,” Gedeon added.

 

Initially, the GSMA's OneAPI initiative focuses on exposing mobile network capabilities such as payment, messaging and location that are to a great extent underexploited by web-centric developers because each operator uses different APIs to expose their network assets, making it difficult for developers to create applications that work seamlessly across different networks.

 

The utilization of a common set of network APIs and tapping into these capabilities will allow the developers and enterprises deploying applications to provide a much richer customer experience.

 

A major focus of OneAPI is Monetization, and the payment API allows developers and enterprises to leverage existing commercial relationships between operators and their billions of customers worldwide. This also helps them in increasing the market potential for applications without needing to establish new, commercial relationships with each individual customer.

 

Developers will be able to increase the size of their customer base as well as capitalize on the resources and expertise in customer billing offered by operators, by collecting payments for applications and services via operator billing systems.

 

For the pilot, the GSMA is collaborating with Aepona, who is providing its Universal Service Platform together with managed services to connect to the three operators in a hosted environment. Aepona's USP provides the essential functions for an aggregated commercial API service, including harmonised exposure of network and payment APIs, partner portal, multi-party settlement, centralised partner management, policy control, routing and privacy management. The GSMA will offer a single contract and common pricing for the use of OneAPI across all three Canadian operators as part of the pilot, and will also provide the billing and payment services between the developers and the operators.

 

PathFinder, which is GSMS’s number translation service, will also be used by the Canadian pilot to determine which operator to send the OneAPI call to while allowing for number portability. It will also enable the rapid rollout of OneAPI to different markets around the world. The specifications for OneAPI are in the process of being adopted by the Open Mobile Alliance.

 

Over the coming year the results of the Canadian pilot will be analyzed and used as a model for further pilots around the world.  

 

In related news, at the 2010 Mobile World Congress (News - Alert) in Barcelona, the GSMA announced that China Telecom has joined the GSMA holding a signing ceremony to commemorate the membership.