Vonage Brings Developer Voice to the CAMARA Project

Introduction

APIs have opened access to nearly every layer of the technology stack, from file storage to machine learning. The one layer that has remained largely closed is the mobile network itself; Network APIs will change that.

The specifications for these Network APIs are being created within the CAMARA Project, an open collaboration run by the Linux Foundation and GSMA. All meetings are public, pull requests are welcome, and every design decision is recorded in GitHub. In principle, any developer can join a weekly call and help shape the standard.

In practice, who has the time or patience to dive into detailed discussions about token lifetimes, data-privacy vocabularies, and edge-case latency budgets? Vonage fills that gap. By engaging with CAMARA’s technical committees, contributing code, and insisting on clear, developer-friendly patterns, Vonage translates telecom requirements into APIs that feel familiar to anyone who’s used an SDK.

APIs Are Eating the Network

If you’ve been anywhere near the telco world lately, you’ve probably heard of Network APIs like SIM Swap, Number Verification, or Quality on Demand. They sound cool in theory: programmatic access to mobile network capabilities. But in practice? It’s messy.

Two parallel efforts are trying to clean this up:

1. GSMA Open Gateway is creating an ecosystem for telcos and aggregators to make these APIs available as commercial products. Think “API marketplaces for telcos.”

2. CAMARA Project is where the API technical specs are designed, everything from how developers authenticate to what the fields are in the APIs are called.

How Vonage Is Making an Impact

1. Leading Developer Input

Most of the names at the CAMARA table are mobile operators. Which makes sense, they own the networks. Developers are rarely part of these conversations, and so Vonage ensures that their perspective is heard.

Vonage is one of the few software-first companies actively shaping CAMARA. Vonage has contributed directly to the design of several APIs, including:

• Number Verification

• Quality on Demand (QoD)

• Sim-Based Authentication

More importantly, Vonage has helped make Network APIs available to developers like you. We helped launch the first Network APIs commercially with Deutsche Telekom, Telefónica, and Vodafone Germany, leveraging the Vonage developer platform to power real customer traffic.

2. Driving Privacy-Conscious Consent

CAMARA brands itself as a privacy-first project, but implementing real consent mechanisms has proven difficult. Many Network APIs don’t involve end-user interaction at all; how do you ask for consent in a server-to-server call?

Vonage is helping to introduce the ConsentInfo API, an API that allows consent capture. We’re also contributing to standards like:

• DPV (Data Privacy Vocabulary) data scopes, based on W3C guidelines, a way to explicitly declare not just what data you want, but why you’re asking.

• End user identification to ensure APIs can establish a legal basis for data access under GDPR and other legal frameworks.

These innovations help remove the friction of managing consent, something essential for developers and telcos working under global privacy laws.

3. Exposing OAuth’s Limitations

OAuth was originally chosen by CAMARA as a way to gate access to network data. But Vonage quickly pointed out a problem: OAuth is designed for long-term, multi-use tokens (think GitHub or Google), not the single-use, low-latency flows that Network APIs require.

Consider this:

• A typical CAMARA Number Verification flow involves up to 10 redirects to authenticate a user.

• All that overhead just to generate an access token that’s used once and discarded.

This kind of latency is a developer’s nightmare. Vonage advocated for lighter, purpose-built solutions, helping shape discussions around CIBA (Client-Initiated Backchannel Authentication) and backend-initiated flows that work in high-speed, low-trust environments.

The Road Ahead

There’s still work to be done:

• Consent capture remains unsolved for backend and aggregator use cases.

• SIM-based authentication needs broader device support, including iOS, where Vonage is pushing App Clips as a privacy-first alternative.

• A broader adoption of Network APIs by telcos to realise their potential.

We’re optimistic! CAMARA and Open Gateway are moving in the right direction, and Vonage is committed to keeping the needs of developers in the minds of the telcos.

Conclusion

The more developers that use Vonage Network APIs, the better we can help represent you within CAMARA. You can get started today and test our growing suite of Network APIs. Help us craft developer tooling like the Virtual Network Operator. Let us know what you think. Join us on the #network-api channel in the Vonage Community Slack.