There is a conversation the telecoms industry has been having with itself, in various forms, for the better part of two decades. It goes roughly as follows.
Operators have an extraordinary set of assets, such as network reach, subscriber relationships, spectrum, trusted identity infrastructure, and they are systematically failing to extract proportionate value from them. The conversation tends to end with a call for a “mindset shift.” Then everyone flies home and the mindset, largely, stays where it was.
At MEF’s recent Global Forum in Barcelona, the conversation happened again. The diagnosis: telcos retreated from direct enterprise relationships and became infrastructure wholesalers, and the margin went elsewhere. The prescription: change the mindset, re-engage enterprises directly, and use the current window of opportunity – in RCS, in network APIs, in AI-enhanced voice – to reclaim the value before someone else does.
The diagnosis is correct. The prescription may be underestimating how hard it is to execute, and how familiar the trap looks from the outside. This article draws on a variety of interviews that reflected key sessions within the MEF’s opening day.
The Pattern
David Fernandez, Co-Founder at Messaging Advisory, spoke to TelcoForge after a session on business messaging and enterprise engagement He was direct about the historical pattern.
“Many of the telcos started going backwards and becoming more wholesalers,” he said.
“My approach to this is like, they have to change the game – that mindset – and go directly to enterprises and start speaking the same language of enterprise.”
This is not a new observation. The retreat from enterprise relationships into wholesale happened gradually over the 2000s and 2010s, accelerated by the rise of OTT players and the strategic decision to treat connectivity as the core product and let others build on top of it. It seemed sensible at the time, but has been costly in retrospect. The telcos built extraordinary networks, but they let intermediaries build the products and manage the clients.
The business messaging market is the clearest case study. A decade ago, sending a transactional SMS to a bank customer required navigating a thicket of bilateral operator agreements. CPaaS providers such as Twilio, Sinch, and Infobip solved that by aggregating operator connectivity behind a single API and selling it to enterprises with a simple contract and developer-friendly tooling. The operators who made that possible received a termination fee for each message. The CPaaS providers got the customer relationship, the platform margin, and the compounding pricing power that comes from owning the distribution layer.
Tim Green, MEF’s programme director for APIs and authentication, told this story.
“There was no such thing as a business messaging market,” he said, “and it was intermediaries… they pulled together all the operators and made sure that, if the business wanted to send messages to its customers, it could just do it with a single contract.”
He was making this point as inspiration. The same intermediary model, he argued, could now catalyse the network API market the same way. He is probably right. The question the industry should be asking is whether that is something to celebrate.
Problematic Exposure
The RCS market is now moving fast enough to make the pattern visible in real time. Business messaging traffic on RCS surged 277% on Black Friday 2025 year-on-year, and Omdia forecasts A2P RCS revenue reaching $4.2 billion by 2029, with traffic growing from 1.5 trillion messages in 2024 to over 6 trillion. Truly impressive numbers, but numbers that describe revenue accruing overwhelmingly to the platform layer, the CPaaS providers and aggregators who have direct enterprise relationships, rather than to the operators who carry the traffic.
Stephanie Lashley, VP of Messaging Strategic Alliances and Infrastructure at Bandwidth and a MEF board member, put her finger on the symptom without quite naming the disease. Talking about RCS pricing, she noted that “every carrier is pricing it differently, and every aggregator is pricing it differently”.
It’s a problem she’d like to see resolved. However, the fragmentation isn’t primarily a coordination failure. In a mature platform economy, the platform sets the pricing. Fragmented pricing is what happens when you have a supply chain without a commercial integrator – or when the commercial integrators are the aggregators competing to own the platform layer while operators haven’t decided whether to contest that position.
In conversation on network APIs there was the same structural undercurrent. Ahmed Serag, Director at Cloudcom representing a technology provider perspective, framed the API opportunity like this:
“We are exposing new signals to the enterprises to be consumed… We are generating new revenue streams for them.”
The language implicit in this is of a supply being made available, not a platform being built. It is wholesale thinking being applied to APIs.
Serag cited an example in Qatar which is a genuinely impressive infrastructure achievement – 100% national API enablement, all operators collaborating rather than competing. But an infrastructure achievement and a commercial platform are different things, and the difference between them is the difference between wholesale and high-margin businesses.
TM Forum’s December 2025 revenue benchmark report, covering 35 of the world’s largest operators and $1.1 trillion in combined revenues, estimated the global network API monetisation market at just $1 billion. Only 28% of executives surveyed rated it a significant opportunity, the joint lowest of any B2B revenue category in the survey.
The instinct in parts of the industry is to dismiss this as pessimistic, citing early-stage dynamics and the theoretical revenue forecasts of $8 billion to $31 billion by 2030 that various analysts have produced. But the $1 billion figure may not be pessimistic; it may be a rational price for what is actually being sold.
If network APIs are being priced on a commodity usage fee, available from operators’ own portals, from Nokia, from Infobip, from Enea, from hyperscalers’ developer platforms, all offering roughly equivalent access to CAMARA-standardised capabilities, then $1 billion may not be an undervaluation of an opportunity. Instead, it is looking at a commodity and valuing that.
This is where Green’s CPaaS parallel comes back to bite us. CPaaS providers didn’t build a multi-billion-dollar market by reselling operator SMS termination at a small markup. They built it by owning the product: the developer experience, the enterprise onboarding, the compliance tooling, the unified billing, and ultimately the enterprise relationship itself. Operators supplied the infrastructure. Someone else built the product.
The pattern is identical to what is now being proposed for the API economy, and the outcome is likely to be identical too, unless operators make different choices this time.
The Harder Road
There is a different model available, but it requires a willingness to treat API access as an investment rather than revenue.
The TM Forum analysis makes the point clearly, even if it does so in the context of measured optimism: make APIs available as cheaply and easily as possible, and what you gain is not the API revenue, which is thin, but the enterprise relationships and co-creation intelligence that follow. An enterprise that integrates your authentication API into its customer onboarding flow is not a customer paying per API call. It is a customer who now has a direct operational dependency on your network capability, a visible use case that can be expanded, and a relationship that an aggregator cannot easily displace.
Anna Gonzales, Marketing Team lead at Digital Tide, offered the clearest illustration of what first-mover platform ownership looks like at country scale. Moldcell, her client in Moldova, was the first operator to launch a new RCS product in that market.
“And when they did,” she said, “it was a new product. In Eastern Europe, you know how it is. It’s not so easy to start something new. They did and they took the first place. And now after them, there are many competitors, everybody else, all the telecom operators.” The market followers arrived. The market creator kept the position.
The API economy has the same dynamics. The operators who move from “exposing signals” to actively co-designing services with enterprises, understanding what problems the API capabilities actually solve, will occupy a categorically different market position from those who publish a developer portal and wait for adoption to accrue.
The CAMARA APIs are standardised precisely so that the technical layer is not the differentiator. The difference is commercial, organisational, and a matter of thinking about building a market rather than selling a product.
In practice, aggregators make commercial sense for operators, who have to navigate a host of commercial agreements to enable the kind of seamless interworking that customers need. However, there are other models telcos could adopt.
For example, the aggregation layer could be managed by a third party as a white-labelled service, enabling the telecoms providers to focus on building their market. That service could be owned by an international body, whether political such as the ITU or commercial such as a dedicated industry body. It would require the buy-in of a minimum number of partners to launch but, as we have seen with many other industry initiatives, that’s not usually too hard to do; and then others join in.
The Window Is Ajar
The industry’s instinct is to note that the API market is early-stage and that there is time to get the model right before the distribution layer consolidates. However, there’s not a great deal of time; and time is exactly what it takes to build a new business.
Abdelhady Ragab, Telecom Egypt’s Fintech and Digital Platforms Senior Manager, described a year-long process of trust-building with government and financial institutions to build the authentication market in Egypt and the MENA region. Resistance that was “100%” a year ago is now shifting toward active promotion. That process took sustained effort and organisational commitment. However, it also built trust with a central bank.
The telecoms industry has demonstrated, repeatedly, that it can build infrastructure of extraordinary sophistication and scale. Telecom Egypt shows that it’s possible to own the service and the customer. For the big money, the industry now has to demonstrate the commercial willingness to own the aggregation and distribution layer to scale globally.
The API moment is not a different opportunity. It is the same kind of opportunity as it has been for RCS and other services, arriving again with a different technical wrapper. The question is whether the result will also be the same.
