CAMARA API Integration for Carrier Middleware: Lessons from Telecom Standardization for Shipping Platforms
CAMARA aims to move telco networks away from point-to-point integrations and ad-hoc APIs on specific technology stacks to generic, abstracted, and common APIs — but shipping and logistics platforms face identical challenges. With the CAMARA project now counting 396 companies and 1,100+ contributors, delivering 25 APIs across 13 sub-projects that have been vetted for quality, consistency, and stability, carrier integration middleware has much to learn from telecommunications' approach to API standardization.
The shipping industry recorded major disruptions in 2024, while simultaneously pushing forward with critical API migrations. FedEx Web Services tracking, Address Validation, and Validate Postal Codes WSDL were retired on May 15, 2024, with the SOAP-based FedEx Web Services being replaced with FedEx RESTful APIs. Similarly, beginning in June 2024, Adobe Commerce merchants could no longer transact with the existing UPS integration, requiring migration to the latest UPS REST APIs. These industry-wide transitions mirror the telecommunications sector's journey toward standardized API patterns.
CAMARA's Architectural Patterns for Resilient Integration
The telecommunications industry's CAMARA initiative provides a blueprint for addressing the fragmentation that plagues carrier integration platforms. CAMARA incorporates a security profile based on OAuth 2.0 and OpenID standards, guaranteeing privacy and security for developers accessing network functions while maintaining interoperability across different platforms and regions.
Consider the complexity facing a multi-carrier platform today. DHL Express uses different APIs for Freight, Express, and Global Forwarding branches, with different API approaches in various regions, requiring developers to work with SOAP protocol, RESTful Services, or plain XML. Meanwhile, platforms like Cargoson, nShift, and EasyPost must maintain adapters for dozens of carriers, each with distinct authentication methods, data structures, and resilience patterns.
CAMARA's approach is necessary to "pave the way for transforming operator networks into service enablement platforms, facilitating the application-to-network integration, which will be key to deliver enhanced and service tailored customer experience". Carrier integration platforms could adopt similar principles by establishing northbound and southbound API design patterns — standardized interfaces toward shippers while maintaining carrier-specific adapters internally.
Standardized Authentication and Security Models
CAMARA's security framework addresses one of the most persistent challenges in carrier integration: authentication sprawl. The Meta-Release includes a Security and Interoperability Profile based on OAuth 2.0 and OpenID standards, ensuring secure, privacy-friendly and seamless access for developers to network information and capabilities.
The shipping industry is experiencing this authentication evolution firsthand. UPS's migration requires support for OAuth 2.0 authentication protocols, while users now need to create an app in the UPS Developer Portal to generate required credentials (Client ID and Client Secret). FedEx's transition from SOAP-based API to REST-based API introduces stricter data validation, new default values, and updated field behavior that may affect shipment creation.
Middleware platforms handling these transitions report significant engineering overhead. Many Magento 2 store owners and developers encounter challenges integrating FedEx Freight shipping carrier, with the most reported issue being FedEx shipping rates failing to appear during checkout due to incorrect FedEx account credentials, misconfigured origin warehouse addresses, or API call limits.
A CAMARA-inspired approach would establish a standardized authentication layer that abstracts OAuth 2.0 flows, API key rotation, and token management across all carriers, reducing integration complexity for platform operators like Cargoson, ShipEngine, and ProShip.
Handling Legacy System Integration Challenges
SOAP is like using an envelope — it's larger, requires more resources and effort to seal and open. REST API is like using a Postcard — it's lightweight, faster to convey the message and easier to update. Yet shipping platforms must navigate complex legacy migrations while maintaining service continuity.
EDIFACT presents significant challenges as a file exchange-based connection where you generate a physical file, transmit it over FTP, and hope everything works due to cumbersome error feedback. Similar challenges exist with FORTRAS, particularly in Germany, where the file format is hard to read and time-consuming to debug.
CAMARA's migration patterns offer guidance for handling these transitions. The telecommunications industry learned that even if telcos agree on common API standards, they may disagree about specific APIs' performance levels, pricing could generate debate, and countries' differing regulations on data consent requirements could be another complication.
Most SOAP API endpoints in freight are scheduled to retire by December 31st, 2025, requiring transition to REST to ensure uninterrupted service. Platforms managing these migrations report months of engineering work per carrier transition, requiring custom adapters and detailed documentation.
Multi-Tenant Routing with Standardized Interfaces
Leading technology firms and telecoms operators representing more than two-thirds of the world's mobile connections now support this approach to open, universal network APIs through CAMARA, GSMA Open Gateway and TM Forum. This cross-operator consistency allows single integrations to work across multiple operators — exactly what carrier integration platforms need.
CAMARA's approach reduces fragmentation and enables developers to create applications that work consistently across multiple networks and countries. Multi-tenant carrier platforms face identical challenges when routing shipments across different carriers based on cost, transit time, or service capabilities.
Consider tenant isolation patterns from CAMARA: each telecommunications operator maintains separate network capabilities while exposing common APIs. Carrier integration platforms like Cargoson, nShift, and EasyPost could implement similar abstraction layers, where tenant-specific routing rules and carrier preferences remain isolated while presenting unified rate shopping and booking interfaces.
CAMARA's benefit for customers comes in consistent and user-friendly access to network capabilities, enabling developers to seamlessly deploy applications to run consistently across telco networks and countries, preventing fragmentation and empowering faster, more versatile advancement.
Observability and Conformance Programs
The CAMARA community has committed to delivering twice-yearly updates to vetted APIs so network operators can plan deployment in their networks, with API users confident to get the latest and most stable versions from their network operators and API providers.
Shipping platforms manage significantly more API volatility than telecommunications networks. The CrowdStrike outage in July caused over $5 billion in losses from grounded flights, downed emergency services, and disruptions to businesses and banks, while a large cellular service outage in early 2024 may have impacted the US economy to the tune of $500 million during an 11- to 12-hour network failure.
Yet carrier integration platforms must maintain higher availability standards. During peak shipping seasons, platforms report handling millions of rate requests and label generations daily across dozens of carriers, each with different SLA commitments and failure modes.
CAMARA's APIs represent a consistent set of aligned, quality APIs that have met rigorous release management and design guidelines. Shipping platforms could implement similar conformance programs, establishing API versioning standards, backward compatibility windows, and automated testing suites that validate carrier integrations before production deployment.
Implementation Roadmap: From CAMARA Patterns to Production
GSMA has teamed up with the Linux Foundation to create CAMARA, an open-source project focused on developing a set of standardized network APIs, creating common definitions for APIs so developers can use a single piece of code to access 5G capabilities across networks.
Carrier integration platforms face a strategic decision: build abstraction layers in-house or leverage existing middleware solutions. Platforms like Cargoson provide a single, standardized transport API that connects to all carriers regardless of their individual capabilities, accessing all shipping services through one unified interface without worrying about underlying technical differences.
The telecommunications industry's experience suggests that standardization efforts require significant coordination. While more than 40 of the world's leading carriers have agreed to adopt CAMARA's API standards, few have made CAMARA APIs available for developers to use commercially due to wariness of investing in a fledgling market, uncertainty about business models, and fears that competitive advantages could be eroded.
For carrier integration platforms, the path forward involves implementing CAMARA-inspired patterns gradually. Start with standardized authentication flows and error handling patterns. Establish northbound API consistency while maintaining carrier-specific southbound adapters. Implement observability standards that provide consistent monitoring across all carrier integrations.
The most successful example of telco collaboration resulted in international mobile roaming capabilities — while most people take it for granted now, the ability to make calls in every country requires sizable and sophisticated orchestration, backed by bilateral contracts between operators and operator consortia.
Shipping needs similar orchestration. Platforms managing carrier integrations should establish working groups to define common API patterns, authentication standards, and observability requirements. The alternative — continuing with point-to-point integrations for each carrier — becomes increasingly unsustainable as API complexity grows and shipping volumes scale.
Want to explore how standardized carrier integration patterns could work for your platform? Consider how solutions that abstract carrier complexity while maintaining full functionality could transform your integration architecture from reactive maintenance to proactive standardization.
