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BSS/OSS Academy
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Section 11.3

GSMA

The mobile industry association and its Open Gateway initiative — operator commitments to expose network capabilities as common APIs, defined in CAMARA.

The GSMA is the trade association of the mobile industry — the operators, plus the vendors and adjacent companies that serve them. It runs Mobile World Congress, manages industry programmes on roaming, eSIM, fraud and spectrum policy, and speaks for operators to governments and regulators. It is not a standards body in the 3GPP sense: it produces industry agreements, guidelines and initiatives that its members commit to — and, where operators need one implementation, technical specifications such as the eSIM (SGP.22) and roaming (IR-series) documents.

For an architect the GSMA matters most today for Open Gateway, its 2023 initiative to get operators exposing network capabilities as common APIs. The distinction to hold onto: **GSMA runs the initiative and the commercial federation; the APIs themselves are defined in CAMARA**, an open-source project GSMA co-founded with the Linux Foundation. TM Forum contributes the Operate APIs that sit between operators and aggregators, and Mplify joined in 2025 to extend the model to wireline networks. Open Gateway is where four of the bodies in this section meet.

GSMAIndustry initiative

GSMA Open Gateway

What is it?

An industry initiative, launched by the GSMA in February 2023, under which mobile operators commit to exposing a common set of network capabilities — number verification, SIM-swap detection, device location, quality on demand — as standard APIs that work the same way across operators. The API definitions themselves are developed in the CAMARA open-source project.

What problem does it solve?

Turns network capabilities into a product developers can buy once and use globally, instead of integrating separately with every operator.

What does it cover?

  • •Operator commitments to expose a defined API set
  • •Federation between operators and aggregators so one integration reaches many networks
  • •Commercial and operational framing: onboarding, channel partners, the Operate APIs from TM Forum

What does it NOT cover?

  • •Not the API specification itself — CAMARA defines and tests the APIs.
  • •Not a replacement for TM Forum's broader BSS/OSS architecture frameworks.
  • •Not a network standard — the capabilities exposed are defined by 3GPP.

Where does it fit?

BusinessApplicationAPIsNetworkOperations

When would an architect use this?

  • •Designing a network-API product line and its exposure layer
  • •Deciding how an exposure platform relates to the product catalog and billing
  • •Partner and aggregator integration design
What Open Gateway does to the BSS
Exposing a network capability as an API is a product decision before it is a network one. Someone has to catalogue it, price it, entitle a developer to it, meter it and bill for it — and, in a federation, settle with the other operators. Open Gateway specifies the aggregator-facing interfaces for some of this (the TM Forum Operate APIs: catalogue, onboarding, ordering) but none of the capability behind them — pricing, rating, entitlement and settlement land on the product catalog, partner management and billing described in Concept-to-Market and Billing & Revenue Management.

Where you'll meet it in the Academy

Official source: gsma.com — Open Gateway. Programme material is public; operators join by signing the Open Gateway MoU, aggregators and vendors through the partner programme.