GSMA says mobile giants to unite on cloud

The GSMA, an industry group representing the world’s biggest mobile phone operators, has announced a new united interface that will give developers universal access to all of their networks, speeding up the delivery of new services and products.

The GSMA will introduce the portal, called Open Gateway, at its annual Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Monday, its director-general, Mats Granryd, said in an interview. AT&T, China Mobile, Deutsche Telekom and Vodacom Group parent Vodafone Group are among the 21 GSMA members that will use the interface.

“We have the phenomenal reach down to the base station and out into your pocket,” Granryd said. “And that’s what we’re trying to make available for the developer community to ultimately benefit you as a consumer or you as a business.”

Mobile network operators, which have struggled for years to grow in competitive and saturated markets, are ditching a previous playbook of going it alone and collaborating to become more attractive partners for technology giants. Allowing developers to build services that can be used on multiple networks simultaneously could lead to new and better-running services.

Big backers

Major cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s Azure back the project, according to a GSMA statement on Monday.

Mobile operators have largely failed to benefit from booming Internet usage over the last decade, leading the European Union to consider ways to get big US technology companies to contribute to carriers’ network costs.  — Thomas Seal, (c) 2023 Bloomberg LP

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