In business, monetisation is what it’s all about. Tim Green, a telco industry journalist and a member of the TechComms content team, explores how telcos will sell more – and spend less – in 2025.
Network APIs
Turning telco insights into revenue
Telco data is valuable stuff. How fast is the network? Who does this number belong to? How new is this SIM card? Where is this subscriber now? Answering these questions can really help a third-party business to improve its products and services.
And with network APIs anything is possible. For example, a developer could use a Number Verification API to authenticate a customer ‘silently’, eliminating the need for fiddly one-time passcodes.
Carriers know this. They’ve launched many developer APIs, especially in the messaging space, which generate good revenue. But as we enter the 5G SA era, there’s an opportunity to go further. The challenge is to standardise so that developers can use one API to connect to all telcos in a generic and repeatable way.
This was a hurdle in the past. Now, the tide is turning. Industry bodies such as the GSMA, TM Forum and CAMARA are standardising APIs for some network functions. And in September 2024, 12 of the world’s largest telcos formed a joint venture to sell a single solution to potentially millions of developers.
Private networks
Will enterprises take the DIY option in 2025?
Standalone 5G gives enterprises an exciting new option: to run their own entirely discrete mobile networks. Will they do it? In fact, they already are. The first private LTE mobile networks have been available since 2017 at oil rigs, airports, hospitals and more.
However, 5G Standalone promises to supercharge the market with low latency, high reliability and improved security. So are we at the start of a growth spurt? According to GSA, there are already 1,489 customer deployments around the world. And Analysys Mason predicts the number of live private networks will hit 60,000 by 2028.
Meanwhile the GSMA expects most mobile operators to offer private 5G networks by 2025, with revenues from the space hitting nearly $20 billion (double the nearly $10 billion generated in 2023).
Telco sustainability
Devoting more energy to using less energy
The telco industry is a relatively modest emitter. In 2022, it was responsible for about 1.6 per cent of global carbon emissions. Not bad, considering it connects most of the global population.
But stakeholders want to do better. They’ve been on a mission to be more sustainable since 2019 (in fact, the industry halved operational emissions in Europe in the 2019 to 2022 period). To do this, carriers pursued strategies such as using renewable energy, switching from copper to fibre, turning off 3G (which consumes much more than 4G and 5G) and embracing low-energy infrastructure tech such as active antenna units (AAU).
Of course, this all makes ethical sense. But it also delights shareholders by cutting energy costs. 2025 should see more initiatives, and further savings.
Tim’s first three blogs, which look at the mobile industry and the network can be found here.
