Watch the video presentation of STL Partners’ research from our Telecoms Europe LIVE event now
Yesmean Luk, Principal Consultant and Practice Lead at STL Partners, asked and strove to answer where is the API revenue opportunity for operators? The other two big themes of her presentation were what types of solutions require network APIs and can telcos take network APIs to market?
STL Partners looked at the market for all northbound mobile network APIs, including MEC. The firm concluded it will be worth $22 billion by 2028. This represents about 2.3% of predicted mobile service revenue, with revenues from MEC-specific APIs accounting for almost a quarter (24%) of forecast edge connectivity in 2028.
Watch the video of her session here.
Luk stressed that this market is in its very early stages with STL Partners carrying out research with developers across all sorts of different use cases like gaming, analytics, some industrial ones, drones, and so forth.
Best effort is good enough for some
The issue is that there’s a group of application developers and applications that see the network as a means of competitive differentiation. It’s either way or significantly enhancing the way they deliver an application, or it enables them to do something they couldn’t do previously.
We’re seeing the emergence of different developers or applications that have a certain degree of network awareness or to some degree, some early network intelligence. At the same time, there is a host of others, the longtail of developers who this as nice to have don’t really think about connectivity.
Alternatively, they are happy with best efforts, or in some cases are happy with finding ways to work around issues with best-effort connectivity.
Another factor is the commercial availability of APIs.
So against this backdrop, Luk asked and strove to answer the questions of where is sweet spot for CSPs and which are the most promising use cases?
Some of STL Partners’ biggest findings include:
• real-time, local use cases want on-prem edge and won’t leverage 5G/MEC APIs, and stuff like moving things around has the compute onboard the device or at the edge node
• lots of instances of not needing absolute real-time info – for example operations can wait until the moving unit docks and in the case of network failure, the device stores data itself so best effort is good enough
• there’s greater interest in the industry in real time, wide area use cases, like gaming as there are some gamers who are willing to pay for guaranteed connectivity and the same for video distribution also, it’s important to figure out where to put edge nodes for upload.
• drone navigation is a big potential application too, and STL Partners has spoken to a number of drone delivery companies, especially for things like medical supplies.
• immersive experiences are prominent at bigger vendor events.
• issues around the accessibility and usability of APIs
Other issues that Luk went on to explore include:
• What does the ecosystem look like to support these use cases?
• The different kinds of aggregators and why they matter
• What is needed to bring about greater network programmability and to enable configurability for external customers?
• Which are the most valuable types of APIs?