ETSI is the European Telecommunications Standards Institute, and one of the most prolific publishers of openly available technical specifications in any industry. For API practitioners its most relevant work is Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) — the standards defining how applications discover and use compute at the network edge — alongside NFV and a large body of security and interoperability work.
ETSI
ETSI’s output is broad, free and genuinely machine-readable in places, which is unusual for a standards body of its age and size.
- A public forge - ETSI hosts specification source and API definitions on its own public Git forge rather than distributing PDFs alone.
- Multi-access Edge Computing - The MEC series defines edge application management, traffic influence and federation, the standards behind any credible edge-discovery API.
- Complementary to CAMARA - Where CAMARA exposes a capability to a developer, ETSI often specifies the mechanism inside the network that makes it possible.
- Volume - Eighty-seven machine-readable definitions were harvested from ETSI for The State of Telecom APIs, more than any commercial operator in the study except one.
ETSI belongs in this catalog for the same reason 3GPP does: it is part of the answer to why telecom has 351 freely downloadable API contracts and almost no callable endpoints.
Referenced in API Evangelist papers
This standard shows up in my published research. These reports read the machine-readable evidence provider by provider — and put this standard in the context of a real sector.
The State of Telecom APIs
87 machine-readable definitions on a public forge, more than any commercial operator in the study but one.
