The purpose of this CXTech Week 29 2024 newsletter is to highlight, with commentary, some of the news stories in CXTech this week. What is CXTech? The C stands for Connectivity, Communications, Collaboration, Conversation, Customer; X for Experience because that’s what matters; and Tech because the focus is enablers.
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Covered this week:
- We need to take Independent Analysts much more seriously in the telecoms industry
- Pig Butchers’ Paradise
- People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff
We need to take Independent Analysts much more seriously in the telecoms industry
The post I wrote on Ericsson’s write downs of Vonage has certainly sparked lots of impressions, well over 7k. With Ericsson and Nokia the top 2 viewing companies.
Within the post’s discussion I highlighted a post I wrote in 2012 comparing telecom API vendors, Apigee, Aepona, Twilio and Voxeo (became Tropo), https://alanquayle.com/2012/04/whats-the-difference-between-a/.
Most agreed with the taxonomy, except Apigee, who claimed to be more than API management. I tried to resolve the disagreement, but ended up being told I had to fly to San Francisco for a whiteboard session to understand their argument.
Simply, they wanted me to go away and let them get away with what I considered a misrepresentation. I didn’t push the case, I’d done my blog, the data was public. But few people in telcos paid any attention.
For the telcos I know who have deployed Apigee over the subsequent 12 years, they got API management, but not the network gateway, which for most was a surprise. I was right, but few paid attention to what I wrote.
I do want to point a finger at the ineptitude of the GSMA, they sold off WAC to Apigee which continued its misrepresentations in telecoms, they drove the OneAPI standards, they drove the Camara standards. There is absolutely no need for an API to be standardized. No one in programmable communications standardizes their APIs; Apple, Amazon, Google just publish, no standards. Yes, they use web standards, but that’s because it’s the Web they run over, McKinsey couldn’t understand that point.
The API must be free to evolve, simplify, change to the markets’ needs. OneAPI failed, Camara is failing, and the GSMA is absolutely wrong in its understanding of the market. W3C would make more sense to take the lead, but they would point out there’s no need for a standard API for telecom services. The successful NaaS (Network as a Service) from the fixed folks is not standardized. Someone at the GSMA needs to be fired, the future of the industry is at stake through its continued ineptitude.
The reason I was reminded about the Apigee post is because the question I was asked, ‘is history being repeated?’ It is, a range of consultants with no experience in QoS (from the cable industry’s Packet Cable Multimedia experiments), network-centric developers, and NaaS (Network as a Service from the fixed folks) appear to be moving the goalposts.
I see Network API sessions spinning away from 5G QoS and SIM swap (which is available from many providers today, e.g. Telesign and Twilio) to a more general discussion of network automation and AI. The move away from 5G QoS is because NaaS is a long established segment as discussed by Epsilon Telecommunications, a KT company. I’m unsure of the business case for such automation in the near/medium term, however, there’s no harm in experimenting, just make sure the investment is appropriate. https://blog.tadsummit.com/2021/05/24/delivering-the-future-of-networking-with-hyper-scalable-connectivity-liang-dong-epsilon/
Why do we have this situation where Ericsson and Nokia appear to be wrong? And do not engage in any discussion on this topic, beyond the usual sycophants and shills. They’ve been busy, ensuring O-RAN did not impact their revenues, and trying to find some new revenues for 5G. Hence all the noise with Private 5G, there are a few private 5G deployments, but enterprises are generally not spending as its expensive.
The problem that is being addressed by Network APIs is not a new revenue streams for the telcos, it’s simply something to talk about between 5G and 6G to get telcos to spend money with their strategic supplier. Between 4G and 5G there were IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) deployments, there were no new revenues for the telcos, though they spend billions on IMS. And when telcos raised a concern on the lack of revenues, “don’t worry with 5G there will be loads of new services.” There was not.
The focus on network APIs is for telcos to spend billions on Camara gateways. But the arguments are weak, OneAPI history is being repeated, the fixed folks have NaaS well defined and mobile is a small piece of it. AND Deutsche Telekom showed its #2 CPaaS (Signalwire) won it new business compared to Ericsson/Vonage/Camara being a large cash sink.
Plus telcos are feeling the squeeze, and some are letting voice and messaging die on the vine from all the spam SMS and robocalling. Telcos provide 4 main consumer services: internet access, PSTN voice, messaging, and emergency comms. Two of those four services have been crapified, telcos must take control of the situation, and not point the finger at proxies. It’s your customers, your services, your responsibility. I’ve shown how Horisen, Kevin Britt at BT, and Three UK with Mavenir can make a significant difference.
There are a few of points I think are important:
- No one in Ericsson, Vonage, or Nokia have bothered to respond to any of my posts. I’ve written many times on the current silliness. How can Nokia Leapfrog Ericsson in Programmable Telecoms? and Is Axiata Reframing Telecom History at DTW24? At TADSummit we’re going to expose the silliness further. Ignoring a problem does not make it go away.
- The CPaaS world is struggling, without AIT (Artificially Inflated Traffic) margins are meager, almost everyone is guilty to a degree as there is no governance. Dan Gill’s company Augnet tried to help the industry, but they just kept sweeping the issue under the carpet. Enterprises and web companies are walking away from SMS, instead using email or passkeys. You know things are bad when email is preferred to SMS. The culture of ignoring problems in the hope they’ll go away is no longer viable. TADSummit is the Conscience of Our Industry.
- The programmable communications market is evolving, programmable telecoms is no longer ‘the place over there with all those telecoms folks talking in weird TLAs, with a nice web API. Voice, messaging, and video are now embedded in other frameworks, like UNS (Unified Name Space) for Industry 4.0, check out this podcast with Matthew Smith. Projects like Jambonz (which has an intern from TADHack adding vCon to their platform), Voxist, or vCon are run by a few people. Yet are changing the telecoms landscape. Telecoms is becoming embedded, not just programmable, and TADSummit is the only place to meet the innovators and have an open and honest discussion – no BS is a policy statement at TADSummit.
TADSummit will again, since 2013, show the future of programmable communications / telecoms which today is unevenly distributed.
Pig Butchers’ Paradise
This post from Frank on Fraud highlights how fraud will accelerate. The platform is a Walmart for Pig Butchering called Huione Guarantee.
Researchers from Elliptic have uncovered the online marketplace that has become widely used by scam operators in Southeast Asia, including those involved in pig butchering. Merchants on the platform offer technology, data, and money laundering services and have engaged in transactions totaling at least $11 billion.
The platform started in 2021 as a seemingly legitimate service for selling cars and real estate.
But now, the services run the gamut and are everything scam compounds need to carry out their scam operations:
- Laundering sex extortion and pig butchering proceeds
- Accepting victims payments
- Selling AI voice clones to fool victims
- Building fake crypto websites that victims interact with
- Selling torture devices to use on scam workers
- Selling Telecom equipment to be used in scam operations
The platform appears to be a sprawling network of thousands of Telegram Channels – many of which are private – but they all tie back to Huione Guarantee.
People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff
Adnan Burak Gurdag is now Director of Software Engineering at Argela Technologies. I’ve known Adnan for over a decade, since TADSummit ran in Istanbul.
Francisco Camejo is now a Senior Consultant at Arcsona. He took part in TADHack Uruguay in 2016 with the hack “Golazo!” by Juan Chomali (17 years old) and Francisco Camejo (19 years old) is an App for football / soccer fields reservations. It shows the football / soccer fields in a map and you can make a reservation through there. The field manager receives an SMS and can confirm or deny the reservation. The user receives a confirmation SMS. They were joint winners of the Telestax prize.
Kapilan Srikaran is now Software Engineering Intern at Apps Lanka. He took part in TADHack 2022 with the hack CounterCode.
Todd Shingler is now Partner at EFESO Management Consultants. I’ve known Todd for over 15 years, since he was CEO of MobileAware.
BHADRESH PANDAV is now Founder at Gotilo App.
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